


World Enough And Time

by laiqualaurelote



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: 1960s, 19th Century, Aliens, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Bridgerton (TV) Fusion, Alternate Universe - Doctor Who Fusion, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Angst, Car Chases, Case Fic, Crossover, F/M, Found Family, Humor, Inspired by Mad Max Series (Movies), Original Character(s), Post-Apocalypse, Regency, Shakespeare, Slow Burn, Time Travel, Weddings, Western
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:35:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28174044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laiqualaurelote/pseuds/laiqualaurelote
Summary: 1929 is going terribly for Jack Robinson, who is about to be suspended for trying to do his job. That is, until a glamorous time-travelling alien crashes his ex-wife's wedding and absconds with his feelings.Or, the AU where Miss Fisher is a Time Lady, Mac is from the future, Dot is from the past, and Jack has no idea what is happening but is just going with it anyway.Episode 7: In which Bert and Cec, cabdrivers of the post-apocalypse, pick up a passenger with trouble on her heels, and a former companion of Miss Fisher’s returns with a vengeance.
Relationships: Elizabeth MacMillan/Daisy Murphy, Hugh Collins & Jack Robinson, Hugh Collins/Dorothy "Dot" Williams, Jack Harkness/Everyone, Jack Robinson & Jane Ross, Phryne Fisher/Jack Robinson, Tenth Doctor & Donna Noble
Comments: 91
Kudos: 100





	1. stand still, yet we will make him run

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Had we but world enough and time,  
>  This coyness, lady, were no crime. _  
> 
> 
> _Thus, though we cannot make our sun  
>  Stand still, yet we will make him run. _  
>   
> \- Andrew Marvell, 'To His Coy Mistress'

Jack meets Miss Fisher on the worst day of his life. 

This is, of course, discounting the war, which occurred to a wholly different Jack Robinson in another life altogether. Certainly this is the worst day of 1929, a hell of a year that has culminated in him standing in the corner at his ex-wife’s wedding reception where none of the guests will meet his eye, not even his former father-in-law, who just six hours ago told him in no uncertain terms that should he continue to dig into the Magdalene Laundry case, he would find himself suspended. 

Jack takes a swig from his glass and finds it empty, because of course it is.

“Drink, sir?” A sweet-faced maid has appeared at his elbow with a tray of cocktails. She bobs a curtsey in response to his murmured thanks. He sips at his new martini and tries not to catch Rosie’s eye as she glows in the centre of her circle, society swells who would never have given her the time of day as Mrs Robinson. He glimpses Sidney Fletcher by the window, smoking a cigar and in conversation with a handsome fellow in a tweed suit. He looks down and discovers that his drink is, again, disappearing faster than it should. To prevent anything untoward from happening, he decides he too ought to disappear.

The Fletcher manse is gratuitously large. Jack has wandered down a number of imposing, varnished hallways when he spots a light through a door left ajar. It is a study, and there is a woman inside, rifling business-like through the papers on a desk.

Jack leans in the doorway and watches her for a while. She is clad in a velvet dress of such a deep shade of claret he can practically taste it. It shimmers under the lamplight, which pools like honey in the hollows of her bare clavicles beneath her sleekly-cropped hair. Eventually he says: “Looking for something?”

She spins to face him. “Oh,” she says, and has the temerity to bat her lashes at him, “I must have got lost on my way to the powder room.”

“Unless you’re intending to powder your nose with the contents of Mr Fletcher’s logbook, I highly doubt that.” Jack moves further into the room; she stands her ground. “So: how do you know Mr Fletcher?”

“You’re mistaken,” she says. “I’m with the bridal party.”

“No, you’re not. I used to be married to - ” Jack manages it with barely a wince “ - Mrs Fletcher, so I think I’d know everyone from her side - and I don’t remember you.”

“My condolences. This must be a difficult evening for you.”

“You’ve no idea,” says Jack. “Nor have you answered my question.”

She removes a card from her purse and thrusts it at him. It reads, with a flourish, _To: The Honourable Phryne Fisher ~ Mr & Mrs George Sanderson request the honour of your presence at the marriage of their daughter Rosie Sanderson to Mr Sidney Fletcher. _“There,” she says, not without a hint of a smirk, “I hope that is satisfactory.”

“And why is it, Miss Fisher,” says Jack, “that I find you not in the company of the happy couple downstairs, but invading the groom’s private study?”

“I could say the same of you.” She plucks her invitation from his hand; their fingers brush. “You have me at a disadvantage, sir.”

“Detective Inspector Jack Robinson.”

“A policeman. I suppose you think that gives _you_ the licence to snoop around.”

“That is part of the job description, yes - along with arresting trespassers.”

“Wasting your time with me,” she says, “when it’s Sidney Fletcher you should be arresting.”

And that does give Jack pause. “On what grounds?”

“I’d find it in a second if only you’d stop distracting me.” She fixes him with a look. “Or are you stalling on the Magdalene Laundry murder on purpose?”

“I - no,” says Jack, derailed. “What do you know about that?”

“Not stalling, just ineffectual. I see.” Miss Fisher crouches down to rattle a drawer. Jack takes two more steps forward, intending to set her straight, just as she stands up to reach for her purse and he finds himself crowding her against the desk. 

She flicks her eyes up and down him and says, “Kiss me, will you?”

“What?” he says witlessly, and then he realises there are footsteps in the hall. 

“Bear with me here,” says Miss Fisher, as if explaining the alphabet to a small child, and then she pulls him to her and kisses him just as Sidney Fletcher comes through the door.

They break apart, gasping as if scorched, which Jack thinks he might as well be. He hasn’t kissed anyone since Rosie, and even then it’s been years. In fact, he hasn’t ever kissed anyone quite like this.

“Good Lord,” says Fletcher, staring. Jack vaguely registers that he is still holding Miss Fisher’s wrist; he can feel her erratic pulse beneath his fingers. It is truly a very strange pulse, some distant unburnt part of his policing mind observes. It is almost as if she has a double heartbeat.

“I would appreciate it,” he says to Fletcher, “if you didn’t mention this to Rosie.”

“Of course, old boy,” says Fletcher narrowly. “Though I do hope you’ll join us back in the drawing room soon - wouldn’t want to miss the toasts.”

“Of course,” says Jack inanely. 

“Congratulations!” cries Miss Fisher as Fletcher retreats from the study. The moment he’s gone, she detaches from Jack with alacrity and kneels down by the locked drawer. She pulls out what seems to be a gold cigarette holder, which produces a buzzing noise, and the drawer pops open. She pounces on one of the folders, rips out a page and makes to stuff it down the front of her dress before Jack catches her wrist again. 

“I believe you owe me one,” he says.

It is a page from a shipping schedule. One of the entries, a merchant ship called the Pandarus, has been circled; it is due to depart Victoria docks on Saturday. 

“Are you going to give that back to me,” says Miss Fisher with impatience, “or am I going to have to make you?”

The impertinence in her voice, coupled with the alcohol in his system, makes Jack do something that he would never have countenanced a year ago, or perhaps even this morning: he folds up the page, reaches across and calmly tucks it out of sight beneath the curve of her decolletage. “There you go,” he says.

Miss Fisher raises her gaze to his. She takes her time about it: a slow, heated rake of the eyes. 

“Are you quite done?” says a new voice at the door. “Or did you get distracted by the view?”

It is the man in the tweed suit - no, Jack realises, it is a woman, her red hair pulled carelessly back at the nape of her neck. She is watching them with wry amusement.

“You were supposed to keep Fletcher busy.” Miss Fisher begins straightening the papers on the desk.

“There’s only so long I can bore a man on his wedding night with talk of my fictional hospital charity,” drawls the newcomer. “Got it? Let’s blow this joint.”

Miss Fisher makes to follow her, but she stops before Jack and reaches out to adjust his bow tie. Then she drags her thumb over his lips. It comes away smeared with rouge.

“Don’t be a stranger, Inspector,” she says, and then she’s gone.

Jack stands in the office of his ex-wife’s new husband and feels as if some sort of natural disaster, perhaps a hurricane or a sandstorm, has swept through it leaving no visible trace except in the terrain of his mind. 1929 is not turning out the way he expected. In fact, he’s no longer sure he’s in the same 1929 at all.

*

It turns out that Sidney Fletcher is an alien. Jack would be lying if he said he didn’t feel a tiny bit vindicated. At the very least, he’s definitely recovered the position of best son-in-law. George stares in horror as Fletcher reaches behind his head and _unzips_ the skin there. It’s hard to describe what happens next. There are a lot of tentacles involved.

“You mean you didn’t know about this?” shouts Jack.

“Dear Lord, no,” spits George, firing at Fletcher as he advances towards them across the ship's deck - to no avail, the bullets simply sink into his skin and seem to get stuck. “D’you think I’d have let my daughter marry _that_?”

Now that's something that doesn't bear thinking about. Jack tries to focus instead on keeping George alive, because he may be a corrupt old devil who has single-handedly unravelled Jack’s faith in the institution he has served for twenty years, but he is still Rosie’s father. Though, given that Jack has no idea how to stop Fletcher from eating them both, the point is perhaps moot.

A piercing whistle cuts through the air. Jack looks up and sees, in all improbability, Miss Fisher standing on the foredeck. She is clad in shimmering black faille, like the world’s most elegant cat burglar, and pointing a gold pistol in their direction. “Yoohoo!” she calls. “Mr Fletcher! Or should I say - ” and then she reels off an unpronounceable string of names.

“Fisher!” hisses Fletcher wetly. “You’ve changed your face, but I should have known you’d meddle in my affairs sooner or later.”

“You’re wanted across three systems,” retorts Miss Fisher, “and you thought you’d just hide out on this backwater planet and start up your old trafficking racket? For crying out loud.”

Fletcher sneers. At least, that’s what his face seems to be doing - strictly speaking it is no longer a face. “What, are you going to stop me with that hand cannon?”

“Oh, this old thing?” Miss Fisher waves her gun. “Hardly. I just needed to keep you talking so she could get behind you.”

Jack spins to see a young woman standing behind them, hefting what seems to be a tricked-out carbine. She racks it and fires a ball of lightning at Fletcher, who collapses in a shuddering ball. 

“Nemidoreans from the Peloxic System,” says Miss Fisher, as if that is supposed to make any sort of sense, “impervious to most projectiles, but susceptible to an enormous electric shock. You may want to wrestle him back into the skin suit before you take him in for questioning, Inspector, or you’ll get a lot of funny looks down at the station. Very well done, Dot.”

“Thank you, miss!” says the young woman. Jack recognises her as the maid from the wedding reception. “You’re right, it does pull to the left.”

“And you corrected it splendidly. Let’s go charge it, shall we?”

“Where are you going?” says Jack haplessly. Fletcher is still shuddering on the deck. George has sunk gibbering onto some coils of rope. 

“To the powder room,” says Miss Fisher, sailing round the corner.

“Oh no you don’t, I need to take your statement,” says Jack, and sets off in pursuit just as a strange wheezing noise starts up, a cross between a car engine turning over and a pneumatic valve releasing air. He rounds the corner and sees nothing there but empty deck. 

In between getting a bunch of traumatised girls off the ship and into proper care, trying to explain the gaping holes in the case to Russell Street and dealing with a distraught Rosie, it is some time before Jack is able to contemplate the mystery of his vanishing witnesses. He decides not to tell Rosie about the alien part of it. She has enough to worry about.

Russell Street refuses to investigate further. George, it is decided, will take the fall for everything. “Clearly he’s lost it,” the acting commissioner tells Jack. “He keeps going on about aliens and other nonsense, the man’s gone mad. The department can’t take any more heat in the press as it is.”

“But there’s got to be more to it,” insists Jack. “George can’t have been the only one in Fletcher’s pocket. This is the time for us to clean house.”

“You’re a good man, Inspector.” The acting commissioner’s smile does not meet his eyes. “You’ve had a rough week. Why don’t you take some time off? Catch up on your gardening.”

Jack walks home fuming. The whole system is rotten, has been from the start. He’d come in thinking he could pull things up by their roots, but years have gone by and he’s as knee-deep in the mud as the rest of them. He is nearly forty; he is alone in life; it has of late been revealed to him that there is another world beyond his small one, and it has slipped out of his grasp. 

He’s so deep in thought that it is a good few blocks before he pays any heed to the car following him. It looks like a Hispano-Suiza, only closed up in a way he’s never seen before even in the most fashionable models, with a roof and tinted windows. He stops warily under a streetlamp and lets the car roll up to him.

Somehow he is not remotely surprised when the door opens and Miss Fisher gets out. “Need a ride, Inspector?”

“Depends on where you’re going,” says Jack decorously.

Miss Fisher props her elbows suggestively on the hood, smiling her cat’s smile. “Why don’t you get in, and we’ll find out?”

Jack leans against the lamppost. “You’re not going to take another powder, are you?”

“I do apologise for all that,” says Miss Fisher, “but it is terribly inconvenient to be taken in by the police, even such a fine specimen as yourself, Inspector. I did hate, however, to leave you in the lurch.”

Jack looks up at the stars above, distant as ever but now with the spaces between them full of secret possibilities. “I have questions.”

“Of course.”

“Aliens exist. Fletcher’s one of them.”

“A Nemidorean,” repeats Miss Fisher. “A very pleasant race, for the most part - Mr Fletcher excepted.”

Jack gestures at her. “Are you an alien?”

“There are more things between heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Inspector,” says Miss Fisher. “But really it would be a lot easier to explain if you would just get in the car.”

It’s the Shakespeare, really, that does it. Jack gets in the car.

“This is not a car,” he says.

“Of course it is.” Miss Fisher has climbed into the back seat, which opens up into what appears to be a glowing corridor. “It’s the best car in the universe.”

“It’s bigger on the inside,” says Jack.

Miss Fisher sticks her head back around the corner. “I would make a joke about that, but I’ve been repeatedly told to stop.”

The corridor leads to a beautifully-appointed turquoise parlour that could be in any grand house in downtown Melbourne, except for the machine where the fireplace would be. Its twinkling dashboard is alight with numerous buttons and levers and things that Jack doesn’t even have names for. He realises that whatever he saw in the front of the car, it is this that is truly driving the vehicle. Then he has to reckon with the fact that this entire space is inside a car, which is more than his already tenuous grasp of physics can handle.

“Drink?” says Miss Fisher. 

“I - ” ventures Jack, attempting to wrest control once more of the English language and failing.

“Scotch, I think, Mr Butler,” she says, and Jack nearly jumps out of his skin when a man appears at his elbow with a glass on a tray.

“Thank you,” he says, rattled.

“Very good, sir,” says the butler, and vanishes into thin air.

“Oh, it’s you.” The tweed-wearing woman has wandered in with a book under her arm - Jack observes it is a new copy of Mrs Woolf’s Orlando - and now she flings herself into a chaise and kicks her feet up on an armrest. “Good, you can keep her company during the strenuous bits. I’m not much for running.” She eyes Jack over her book. “I do hope you like running.”

“Inspector, this is Dr Elizabeth MacMillan,” says Miss Fisher. “And Dot is - where is Dot, Mr Butler?”

“In the kitchen, making biscuits,” says the butler, appearing next to her. Jack nearly chokes on his drink.

“Thank you. If you could let her know we’re all aboard?”

“Of course, miss,” says the butler, and disappears again.

“Phryne,” says Dr MacMillan, turning a page, “please explain things to this poor man before he has a conniption.”

“Oh, where to start?” Miss Fisher points at Dr MacMillan. “Mac is from the future, Dot is from the past. Well, your future and your past. It’s all relative.”

“And yourself?” says Jack.

“I,” says Miss Fisher, “am from somewhere else altogether. Oh, here’s Dot. Dorothy Williams, Inspector Jack Robinson - you met on the ship, if you recall.”

“Do have a biscuit, Inspector,” says Miss Williams, who has entered wearing an enormously fluffy pink sweater and huge baking mitts, in which she is carrying a steaming tray of biscuits, “only mind that they’re still hot.”

The biscuit is very good. Something about it grounds him in the daze of all these revelations. Jack says as much to Miss Williams, who blushes and replies: “Will you be joining us, Inspector?”

“What?”

“Travelling,” she says, as if it is the most evident thing.

The last time Jack went travelling, he was a 24-year-old lance corporal thrilled at the chance to see the world. Suffice to say, it hadn’t gone too well. 

“But where to?” he hears himself say.

Miss Fisher’s smile is slow and golden, like the sun cresting a hill. She puts her hand on the dashboard, strokes it lovingly. 

“There’s a whole world out there, Inspector,” she says. “Where do you want to go?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is currently a one-shot, though I actually have backstory ideas for almost all the characters and may or may not expand this into an episodic series, depending on time and inspiration. I recently discovered that MFMM is leaving Netflix in my territory at the end of this month and am still in a state of panic-grieving.
> 
> (UPDATE: it is now an episodic series!)


	2. my salad days, when I was green in judgment, cold in blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jack attends the world premiere of Antony & Cleopatra, but also there is murder

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _My salad days,  
>  When I was green in judgment: cold in blood,  
> To say as I said then!_  
> \- Antony & Cleopatra, Act I Scene 5

“That’s it,” declares Dr MacMillan. “We’ve broken Jack.”

“This is the very first time in history that this play is performed,” says Jack. “We are its very first audience. So yes, Dr MacMillan, I am somewhat overwhelmed.”

“Oh hush, Mac,” says Miss Fisher, chin propped on her hands at the edge of their box. “Don’t be the sort of person that talks at the theatre.”

“It’s the 17th century,” says Dr MacMillan, unrepentant. “Everyone talks at the theatre.”

It is true that the actors onstage are shouting quite a bit to be heard over the hubbub of the groundlings, and that there is very little in the way of set to evoke antiquity, and that from their vantage point, they can quite clearly see the prompter hissing lines in the wings. But still, Jack is enraptured. He murmurs the lines along with the cast as they are declaimed for the first time in the hearing of an audience: “The city cast her people out upon her; and Antony, enthron’d i’ th’ marketplace, did sit alone, whistling to th’air which, but for vacancy, had gone to gaze upon Cleopatra too, and made a gap in nature.”

Miss Fisher flashes a grin at him. “What do you think?”

“It beggars description,” says Jack honestly.

“I do think he’s rather pulled it off,” agrees Miss Fisher. “I must commend him later; he quite took my feedback to heart.”

“Hang on,” says Jack. “You’ve met him. Shakespeare.”

“Of course,” says Miss Fisher. “How’d you think I scored these tickets? It was years ago - in my timeline, anyway - back in the 1590s, I think it was, when they were still trying to move the theatre across the river in bits. I loaned him a spot of cash to help things along and said he could pay me back by writing me a character.” 

“Oh come on,” says Dr MacMillan. “He never based Cleopatra on you.”

“Well, he didn’t actually know Cleopatra, did he?” says Miss Fisher archly. “I was the next best thing.”

“You,” says Dr MacMillan, “are the actual worst.”

Miss Fisher makes a face at her. “Hush now. You’re ruining it for Jack.”

Jack learnt his Shakespeare under mortar fire, so it would take a lot to ruin his appreciation of the Bard - though, it turns out, this extends to the actor playing Enobarbus walking onstage and abruptly falling down dead at least ten scenes before he is supposed to, which rather throws the rest of Act Four out of whack. 

“Oh dear,” says Miss Fisher, as the cast attempt awkwardly to cart the body offstage while still saying their lines and the audience mutter mutinously and start groping for loose vegetables. ”This didn’t come up in the reviews.”

*

“There are rules, of course,” Miss Fisher told him at the beginning. “No crossing your own timestream. No interfering with other people’s history. While time allows for a certain latitude, there are fixed events that absolutely cannot be changed.”

“Like the war,” said Jack.

A shadow crossed Miss Fisher’s face. “Yes. Most wars are fixed.”

“What would happen if I went back in time and tried to stop the war?”

“Paradox. Time would cease to work. Whatever fate you’re trying to avoid, the paradox is always worse; never choose the paradox.” 

“You sound like you’ve tested it.”

Miss Fisher made a non-committal noise. “Pass the whiskey, will you? It’s in the glove compartment.”

Jack handed her the bottle over the gearshift. “I ought not to condone drink-driving.”

Miss Fisher scoffed, pouring herself a measure and him another. “I’m not driving, we’re being perfectly still. It’s the universe that’s expanding.”

Jack took a contemplative sip. “I didn’t think it’d look like this. Everything’s so much smaller.”

Through the windscreen of the TARDIS, they watched the Earth turn beneath them. He could just about see Australia from up here; somewhere in that distant shape was Melbourne, and somewhere in that City South station, with its endless churn of tiny dramas, utterly oblivious of the vast expanse of the universe beyond. 

“Thank you for stopping for me,” he said.

“It was my pleasure,” said Miss Fisher, “but for which I never do anything. Have you decided where you want to go yet?”

“Not yet,” said Jack. “But I’m quite content with the view so far.”

*

“Murder,” pronounces Dr MacMillan.

“Murder!” exclaims Miss Fisher, thrilled.

“Murder,” says Jack fatalistically. “Is it too much to hope, at least, for normal human murder, or must it be exotic alien murder?”

“I’ve got to get these samples back to the TARDIS,” says Dr MacMillan, “but given that his heart literally seems to have exploded out of his chest, I’m leaning towards the latter.”

“So much for a nice night at the theatre,” says Jack.

“Lady Phryne!”

A man whom Jack last saw in the minor role of Agrippa has pushed through the crowd of gaping actors. He is a little weedy, with a high forehead and a retreating hairline, not the sort of fellow who would turn heads in a crowd - so it takes Jack more than a few seconds to realise the man bending over Miss Fisher’s graciously outstretched hand is William Shakespeare.

“Was the play to your liking, milady?”

“It boyed me in the posture of a whore,” says Miss Fisher impishly, “but nonetheless it’s to my fancy, I thank you for it. Well, apart from this.” She nods at the impromptu autopsy happening on the props table. “I hope you don’t mind the liberty - Dr MacMillan here is a physician, and thought it meet to examine the body while it is warm.”

“Of course,” says Shakespeare distractedly. “A dreadful business - the last thing we need with the other playhouses nipping at our heels. There’s talk of unnatural doings again - ”

“Again?”

“The matter with the Carrionites, some years ago - ”

“Oh, those,” says Miss Fisher dismissively, “I wasn’t around for that, it was the other one, what’s-his-face. No, this is something quite different.”

Shakespeare wrings his hands. “T’was but nigh a month ago that Master Crossley here joined our number. Where we shall find a replacement in so short a time, I hardly know.”

“I believe I have a solution,” says Miss Fisher. “Master Robinson here, my man of business, has the finest memory this side of the Thames; you need but speak a line to him once, and he has it by heart. I’ll loan you his time, at least till you can find someone else.”

“I - what?” says Jack. Everyone is staring at him. 

“Well, sir?” says Shakespeare urgently. “Let us have it.”

“Yes,” puts in Miss Fisher, who is clearly enjoying herself far too much, “ _prithee_.”

Jack knows the part, of course. He learnt it in a trench for lack of anything else to read, the pages of his Complete Works spattered with mud and hanging together by scant threads. Not that he ever expected to have to declaim it in an emergency audition in front of the man who wrote it. But he has found that being under the gaze of Miss Fisher compels a man to reckless deeds, so he breathes in and begins.

“The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, burned on the water - ”

The company is silent until he finishes. Eventually Miss Fisher says: “Will he do?”

Shakespeare is staring at him, an odd look in his eyes. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, my lady, he’ll do.” And then, briskly: “Right, lads, let’s have the costume off poor Crossley.”

Jack stares as the cast efficiently strip the corpse of its garments, bloodstains and all, and bundle them into his arms. The quartermaster gives him a matter-of-fact nod in the universal language of _budget cuts, you know_.

“Happily,” says Miss Fisher, “I know an excellent laundress.”

*

Dr MacMillan is from his future. She doesn’t like to talk about it. “What’s there to tell?” she said when he asked, early on. 

“Is it - ” Jack tried to find the words. “Is it good?”

Dr MacMillan thought it over. “Well, there are gay rights,” she said eventually, “but also the planet is dying.”

“Oh,” said Jack. He considered this. He was surprised at the lack of feeling he had towards the news about the planet; it was not something that would occur in his lifetime. “Do you ever plan to go back for good?”

“Someday,” said Dr MacMillan. “But I’ll live in denial a little longer, Inspector.”

*

Miss Williams is from his past. She never talks about it. Miss Fisher has given him the bare bones of it: Miss Williams was born in the latter half of the 16th century, at the height of the witch trials; as a maid in a wealthy household, she resisted the attentions of her employer with some force and was subsequently named as a witch. She was on the verge of being burnt at the stake when Miss Fisher came to town.

Miss Williams does not come along on trips to anywhere near the time she was from; she stays in the TARDIS and knits, or helps Mr Butler bake, or watches pictures with Mr Butler, whom she seems to regard as she would any human companion, even though Mr Butler is what Miss Fisher calls “an artificial intelligence service construct I downloaded into the mainframe”. He calls her “Dorothy” with fondness and listens to her wax lyrical about her favourite actors.

Miss Williams is probably never going back to her own time. Jack thinks it is better, on a whole, that times have changed since.

*

“I don’t know if this can be salvaged, miss,” is Miss Williams’ appraisal of Crossley’s costume, “but I think the ship can manage a decent copy. Anyway, it looks like you’re taller than he was, Inspector.”

They’re gathered in what passes for Dr MacMillan’s shipboard lab and must look a sight: he and the good doctor are still in doublet and hose, although she has slung a lab coat over her ensemble and is tinkering with equipment. Miss Fisher is occupying an entire counter on her own, so voluminous are her skirts. 

“Will you look at this?” says Dr MacMillan, brandishing her tweezers. “Splinters everywhere, on the costume. These too - I pulled them out of his flesh.”

“Perhaps someone threw him very hard onto a wooden surface,” muses Miss Fisher.

“The whole theatre’s made of wood,” says Jack. “But I’ll keep an eye out for any damage backstage, since it seems I’m to play your Roman soldier.”

“You will do splendidly,” Miss Fisher assures him. “It’s a shame to waste that voice of yours on reading arrest charges. Anyway, we need a man on the inside - I believe Crossley was up to something. Didn’t they say he’d just joined a month ago, from another troupe?”

“The Southwark Players,” says Jack. “Poached from downriver.”

“Possible motive?” Miss Fisher fiddles thoughtfully with the embroidery on her kirtle. “A punishment for defection, perhaps. Though I don’t see how the Southwark Players or anyone in this century could pull off such a murder, unless Will’s right and there really are witches involved again. Sorry, Dot.”

“That’s all right, miss.” Miss Williams has returned with a clean costume. She wrinkles her nose at the cloak. “That needs pressing.” She departs with it.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” says Jack plaintively as Miss Fisher advances upon him with the rest of the outfit. 

“One gaudy night, my sad captain,” she says, one hand coming up to brush his collar as if she means to help him through a costume change on the spot. Jack catches wildly at it before she can wreak further havoc. “I think I ought to do that myself,” he rasps.

Miss Fisher’s eyes drop, with as much subtlety as a train whistle, to his lips. Her own quirk.

“Cut it out,” barks Dr MacMillan. “Not in my lab, you two.”

*

Travelling with Miss Fisher might possibly be the best decision Jack has made in his life; it might also be the worst.

First: the kiss. Having kissed her once, he cannot stop thinking about it; he thinks about it once a day, and sometimes every other hour. It is not seemly to think so about someone he shares quarters with, even if these quarters are the liminal space of an interdimensional vehicle. He hopes she does not realise this, but suspects she already has.

Second: the flirting. Miss Fisher flirts often and flirts hard. He is under no illusion that he is special in this regard; it seems at times she will flirt with anything with a pulse. It is natural to her as breathing or blinking. He wonders if it might be cultural, something they do wherever it is she comes from. So he pretends he hasn’t noticed and that it doesn’t drive him to distraction. This, after all, is a woman who keeps on board an entire gallery of nude paintings of herself and lets her guests stumble into it when they’re simply trying to find the pantry.

(“Do you just zip through history posing naked for anyone who’ll paint you?”

“I’ll have you know I only pose for the best, Jack. There are plenty of men who’ve tried to paint me without invitation - look at all those paintings of me baring my breasts before the Areopagus. It’s not like any of them were actually _at_ the trial.”

“That’s too much,” said Jack. “Please don’t tell me you were the original Phryne of antiquity. I refuse to believe it.”

Miss Fisher winked at him. “If you’d been there, you’d have acquitted this too.”)

Third: he still does not know why she stopped for him. He has asked about this a number of times, and always she has evaded the question. “I had a good feeling about you, Jack,” was the closest he got. 

“And you do everything based on your feelings, I suppose.”

“I’ve done it for hundreds of years,” she said blithely. “I don’t see why I should stop now.”

All this adds up to a problem, which he had not considered before he boarded the TARDIS and which only grows the longer he spends travelling with her. Still he is refusing to consider it. He tells himself that all he needs to do is to do nothing about any of it, and it will all be fine.

*

The set for Actium collapses an hour before they’re meant to go on. “A brace, a brace! My kingdom for a brace!” bellows Richard Burbage, who’s playing Antony; Jack gathers, from the roar of laughter this is greeted with, that he played Richard III prior. All the apprentices have their hands full, so Jack says: “I’ll go.” It’s a good chance to poke around backstage unaccompanied.

While rummaging through the wood store, he stumbles across Shakespeare curled up behind a pile of scrap timber. “Confound it, can a man not have peace for a minute of the day,” he snaps irritably, before he sees who it is. “Pardon, Master Robinson.”

“Actium is in need of bracing,” says Jack by way of explanation, holding up some loose timber. “My apologies; you’re trying to write.”

Shakespeare looks at his blank parchment and sighs. “A letter to my wife I’ve owed for a month. I have written some twenty plays that have been shown at court, yet a domestic missive stumps me. You are married, sir?”

“I was,” says Jack. 

“I’m sorry to hear it,” says Shakespeare. He seems to have assumed from the past tense that Jack is widowed; since this is easier than explaining divorce to a Jacobean, Jack lets it slide. 

“My wife and daughters are in Stratford,” Shakespeare goes on. “I see them once a year, if the roads allow. She would have me home more often, but it chafes me to be in the country; nor can she abide London. I have words aplenty for the masses, but none to bridge the gap between her and me. Yet the union persists.”

“A marriage is a marriage,” says Jack.

“That it is.” Shakespeare gives him a searching look. “You have a way about you, Master Robinson, that loosens a man’s tongue. It must be why the Lady Phryne keeps you in her counsel - along with your remarkable memory. If I did not know better I would have figured you for a script-stealer - they work in the playhouses along the river, you know, selling parts from one company to another.”

Jack is about to aver, but then they hear someone yelling “Fire!” 

The fire has been started in the props store. As Jack races towards it, he sees a figure streak past him away from the blaze and instinctively gives chase through the tiring house, just barely restraining himself from shouting: “Stop! Police!” The figure is almost at stage door when something plunges out of the shadows above and plucks him off his feet.

Jack stumbles to a halt. He can see something moving overhead in the darkness, but he cannot fathom what it is. He makes for a ladder and climbs into the Heavens.

Up there, it creaks like a ship in motion. Jack treads carefully across the rickety floor of the Heavens. There’s a roiling, unearthly mass of something above the trapdoor through which they lower the actors playing gods and sprites - something like a vast knot of coiling wood. He edges towards it. 

The man - the would-be arsonist - is at its heart. Wood snakes around him, pulls him taut, stops his mouth. There is wood curled around his wrists, ankles and neck. Jack realises it means to pull him apart.

“Stop,” calls Jack, reaching for a railing to catch his balance. He muffles a curse as something bites into the palm of his hand - a long splinter. As he watches in disbelief, it wriggles deeper _into_ the flesh of his hand, worming its way towards his bloodstream.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he says to the thing in the theatre.

The wood tenses. The man in its coils shrieks something, muffled. 

“Yes,” says Jack, keeping the same soothing tone and edging forward, ignoring the pain in his hand. “I know he was going to hurt you. But this is not the way; give him to us and let him have the justice of men.”

The thing bristles. Splinters flex along its coils like hairs.

Jack dredges a line up from his memory. “The quality of mercy is not strained; it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven, upon the place beneath. It is twice blest - ”

The knot of wood is easing. The man in its grasp falls to his knees, gasping. The wood shivers and shrinks back into the darkness, until it is only timber and paint. 

Jack looks down at his palm. The splinter in his flesh is still.

He sighs and hauls the man to his feet. “Who sent you?”

“Th - the Southwark Players.” The man’s teeth are chattering. “Th - they said to b - burn the, the playhouse, for Cr - Crossley - b - but they said nothing of the monster - ”

“You’re not going to tell anyone about that,” says Jack wearily. “Or they’ll declare you mad and send you to Bedlam. All right? Now let’s get back down.”

*

“Your theatre is alive,” says Miss Fisher matter-of-factly.

“What, the Globe?” Shakespeare gapes at her. “God’s bones.”

“In a sense,” agrees Miss Fisher. “Where did you get the wood for it?”

“It was timber from the Burbages’ old Theatre. When they lost the land, we moved it across the Thames.”

“This is roodwood,” says Miss Fisher. “Who knows how Burbage got hold of it, but it can lie dormant for centuries until something awakens it. You dismantled it and rebuilt it with your bare hands. You claimed it with sword and dagger and you carried it across the river on your backs and you wrote words for it and you said those words in its heart. It’s a living theatre now. It answers to the King’s Men.”

“And what of Crossley?”

“Crossley was stealing parts from your plays,” says Jack. He runs a finger absent-mindedly over the shape of the roodwood splinter in his palm - Dr MacMillan had offered to remove it for him, but he had declined. It had not felt right to do so before the play, like breaching the theatre’s trust. “He was selling them to the Southwark Players. The theatre punished him by, well, breaking his heart.”

“The saints preserve us,” says Shakespeare quietly. “What shall we do?”

“Well, the theatre is yours,” says Miss Fisher. “If you look after it, it will look after you. And Heaven help anyone who tries to get in its way.”

Shakespeare considers this. Then he reaches out, hesitantly, and pats the nearest pillar. Jack feels the vibrations go through the floorboards, through even the splinter in his flesh. The theatre purrs.

*

Jack looks beyond the glare of the rushlights into the darkness of the Gods. “She did make defect perfection, and, breathless, pow’r breathe forth.”

He is glad, in a way, that he cannot see her as he speaks these lines. She is so brilliant in his thoughts that he sometimes finds it hard to look straight at her for too long, like staring at the sun. 

“Now Antony must leave her utterly,” he hears the actor playing Maecenas say.

“Never,” says Jack, “he will not.”

He is no Antony, he knows; nor does he aspire to be. He is, at best, a side character in this drama, who will come on from time to time to rhapsodise her splendours, immortal words from a forgettable face. Eventually he will wander off and die some esoteric death in the background. That is his role in the proceedings; even this repays him.

“Age cannot wither her,” he says into the rapt darkness of the playhouse, “nor custom stale her infinite variety. Other women cloy the appetites they feed, but she makes hungry where most she satisfies.”

Later, in the roar of applause from the audience, he hears the clear bell of her laughter over the sound and fury. He looks up, unseeing, into the dark, and knows she is looking back.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The character Enobarbus in Antony & Cleopatra does in fact die of a broken heart. It’s bizarre, but then again it’s Shakespeare.
> 
> The Carrionites appear in the Doctor Who episode The Shakespeare Code, which is set in 1599. "What's-his-face" is, of course, the Tenth Doctor.
> 
> In my headcanon for this AU, Phryne is in fact the original ancient Greek courtesan of that name, who was prosecuted for impiety and at the trial bared her breasts to the judges, who acquitted her out of pity. She was so rich, it is said, that when Alexander the Great destroyed the walls of Thebes, she offered to fund their rebuilding on the condition that they be inscribed “Destroyed by Alexander, restored by Phryne the courtesan” and this sounds like exactly the kind of thing Miss Fisher would do.
> 
> Richard Burbage, considered to be one of the greatest actors of his day, did indeed originate the role of Richard III and, it is likely, Antony. The Southwark Players are a fictional troupe.
> 
> I’ve been reading Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell - I highly recommend it - and it depicts the relationship between Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway (Agnes in the book) as being strained by separation but nevertheless one of equals, even though she was illiterate and preferred the country; words aren’t all there is to brilliance.
> 
> Because parchment and ink were dear back in the day, play scripts were literally cut up into “parts”, such that each actor only knew his own lines and the cues that preceded them. This also prevented the full scripts from being stolen. 
> 
> “The quality of mercy is not strained” is from Portia’s speech in The Merchant Of Venice.
> 
> One of my favourite stories about the Globe is how the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, as Shakespeare’s company was known in 1599, stole the timber for it from their former landlord after their original lease expired. Armed with swords and daggers, they broke into the site, dismantled the theatre and subsequently ferried it over the Thames and built the Globe. The Globe did actually burn down in 1613 during a performance of Henry VIII, when a misfired stage cannon set the thatched roof on fire; nobody was injured and it was later rebuilt.
> 
> Roodwood is my own invention, though I’ve always liked the idea of a sentient theatre that will look after you if you look after it and don’t think it too far from reality.


	3. things extreme and scattering bright

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Dot concludes a very long engagement and Jack discovers rock n' roll.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _For, nor in nothing, nor in things  
>  Extreme, and scattering bright, can love inhere_  
> \- John Donne, ‘Air and Angels’

Jack is wandering around the TARDIS library, where the books seem to be shelved without rhyme or reason - Miss Fisher has assured him there is Zane Grey in there somewhere, but all he can find are alarmingly orphic volumes of ancient erotica - when he hears the sound of soft weeping. He tracks it to an alcove, where he finds Dot surreptitiously dabbing at her eyes.

“Oh, Inspector,” she says, blinking furiously, “I didn’t see you there.”

“Miss Williams,” says Jack, concerned, “are you quite all right?”

“Yes!” exclaims Dot with a ringing cheer that is patently false. “Absolutely! All is well!”

This puts Jack in a quandary. On the one hand, the notion of dealing with weeping young women fills him with unmitigated horror. On the other, Dot is clearly not all right. Dot evidently adores Miss Fisher and keeps her in perfect confidence; that she is crying alone in the library instead of confiding her woes in their host means that something is truly, terribly wrong. He sighs and sits down at the edge of the alcove. 

“Miss Williams,” he says. “Dot, if I may. What is the matter?”

Dot gazes at him, stricken, then bursts into a fresh bout of tears. She fishes out a handkerchief so sodden as to be essentially useless. Jack patiently hands her his own and waits.

Eventually Dot pulls herself together enough to say, “I’m ever so sorry, only - only I was thinking about how I’m meant to be getting married tomorrow.”

In the whole time Jack has been on board the TARDIS, Dot has given no indication of being engaged. Jack would consider himself a poor sort of detective for not picking up something of that magnitude. Which means - 

“How long,” he says gently, “has your wedding been tomorrow?”

Dot sniffs. “Three hundred and sixty days.”

“Dot, that’s practically a year.” 

“Please,” says Dot, wide-eyed, “you mustn’t tell Miss Fisher. She would fret so.”

So: worse than he thought. “I think,” says Jack, “that you had better start at the beginning.”

And so Dot tells him about Weeping Angels.

*

Weeping Angels, as Dot describes them, are “the kindest psychopaths” in the universe. They resemble stone statues of angels, with their hands covering their eyes; this is because they literally turn to stone whenever they are observed by another living being, a protective mechanism that can backfire if they are trapped into looking at one another. The touch of a Weeping Angel sends the victim back in time; the Angel feeds off the potential time energy from the lives they might otherwise have led. Ordinary human lives are their diet; something like the TARDIS would be a feast for the ages.

Dot first encountered the Weeping Angels in the 21st century, where she and Miss Fisher had accompanied Mac to deliver a lecture at a medical conference - it was all very well to be a time-traveller, Mac reckoned, but when it came to academia one had to keep one’s hand in. The conference had gone rather well, all things considered; there had only been one murder, and Miss Fisher had established quite quickly that it had been the neuroscientist at the department mixer with the antifreeze. Also at the conference, however, she had learnt of a spate of mysterious disappearances around the city and decided to investigate.

It turned out that there was an entire host of Angels stalking Melbourne. Miss Fisher had run them out of town, or at least out of that time period, but not before one of them had got to Dot and sent her to 1968.

“So I waited,” Dot says. “I thought Miss Fisher would come for me any day. But after a while, I realised it was harder for her to find me than I thought.”

“How long were you in the Sixties?”

“A year and two months,” says Dot. “I tried all sorts of things to get a message to her - taking out ads in the personals, and so on. None of it worked. I got a job in a shop. I thought, well, of all the times the Angel could have sent me, the Sixties weren’t so bad. There were a lot of good pictures to watch.”

The other complication about the Sixties was the young constable who had first found Dot wandering lost along the St. Kilda foreshore and who had, after several months of courtship, proposed to her. “By then I didn’t think Miss Fisher would ever come back for me,” says Dot, “so I said yes.”

Miss Fisher, as usual, defied all expectations by showing up on Dot’s doorstep the night before her wedding - she had tracked her down via a news article in The Age, in which Dot had been briefly quoted about the hot water having cut out in her boardinghouse after it was fitted for natural gas - and Dot had panicked, allowed herself to bundled back aboard the TARDIS and so departed 1969.

“I didn’t know if I would ever get the chance to travel with her again,” Dot tells him. “I couldn’t give that up, you see. But I also miss Hugh terribly. Even the smallest things set me off.” She waves the book she has been clutching this whole time; Jack observes it is a copy of a Collins dictionary. “I’ve been graced with such happiness, Inspector - the chance to see the universe and the love of a good man - so I don’t know why I am so miserable.”

“You love him?” says Jack. “This Hugh Collins.”

Dot visibly brightens at the mention of her fiancé’s name. “He’s just marvellous, really. The sweetest, kindest man. And he’s very handsome too, especially in his uniform. He’s a policeman - just like you, Inspector.”

“I wouldn’t call that a ringing endorsement,” says Jack. “But do you want to marry the man?”

Dot wrings his handkerchief in distraction. “Yes. No. Do you think I could marry him and stay on as Miss Fisher’s companion?”

“We’ll have to ask Miss Fisher about that, won’t we?”

*

“Dear Dot!” exclaims Miss Fisher in distress. “Why did you never say anything? How you must have tortured yourself this whole time!”

“I didn’t want you to worry, miss,” says Dot faintly.

“Well, we shall have to send you back to 1969.” Miss Fisher starts scrolling through the TARDIS log. “I think we can get you to within an hour or so of when you left - I am a very precise pilot, if I may say so myself - you won’t miss the wedding, and in fact your Hugh won’t even know you’ve been gone.”

“But that’s the thing, miss. I do want him to know.” Dot takes a cup of tea from an anxiously hovering Mr Butler with a murmured thanks, then presses on. “If we’re to be husband and wife, we can’t keep secrets from one another.”

“Yes, tell him everything,” says Mac sardonically, “that’s going to go well.”

Miss Fisher swats absently at her. “Really, though, Dot,” she adds, “how do you think he’ll take it?”

Dot’s lip wobbles. “I suppose the worst thing that could happen is that the wedding gets called off. Which, you know, would have happened anyway if I never went back to 1969.”

  
  


“Well then, we shall to the Summer of Love,” declares Miss Fisher, striking a pose. “A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop, a-wop-bam-boom!”

Everyone stares at her.

“Never mind,” says Miss Fisher.

*

1969 is very loud. There are great shining electric signs everywhere, and modish little cars all the shades you might find in a candy box. The women have positively enormous hair. Jack wonders how they keep it up, or what they’re hiding under it. 

“What’s that noise?” he asks.

“Oh, that,” says Dot. “They call it rock n’ roll.”

“Hm,” says Jack. “It’s...excitable.”

“That’s what I thought too, Inspector. It really does stick in your head, though.”

It is a little unnerving that Dot’s fiancé also works at City South, and more than a little unsettling for Jack to see the familiar façade, even with a fresh coat of paint and the name above the entrance done up in new lead lettering. The freckled young constable on duty barely glances up when Jack walks in and asks to see Constable Collins.

“Who’s asking?” 

“Detective Inspector Jack Robinson,” says Jack automatically. His rank falls easily off his tongue; he finds, oddly, that he’s missed saying it.

The constable doesn’t even stir at the mention. “You just missed him, he’s down at the pub with his mates. Fellow’s getting married tomorrow.”

“I’ll pass on my felicitations,” says Jack, and departs the station before he gives in to the temptation to investigate it further, like finding out who has his old office.

Again, he has to be the one to beard the pub and retrieve Collins. “It’s a bit rowdy,” says Dot delicately. “I don’t think I ought to be seen in there.”

“I’ll go,” says Miss Fisher brightly. “I like a lively pub myself.”

“I’m sure the last thing Constable Collins needs on the eve of his wedding is a strange woman waltzing into his local and asking for him by name,” says Jack. “Just...keep the engine running, will you?”

The radio is on full blast, someone singing salaciously about honky tonk women, _she blew my nose and then she blew my mind_. Jack picks his way through the crowd to the group of men at the back of the pub bellowing a drinking song and ushering one of their number onto a table. He’s a fair, strapping lad with an open sort of face, laughing good-naturedly as his friends call for a toast. “To your last night of freedom, Collins!”

“To the end of my troubles with you lot,” Collins shoots back. His face softens. “And to Dorothy Williams, the best girl in the world.”

“You sap!” shouts someone else, but he is drowned out by a chorus of cheers and the clashing of pint glasses.

Jack waits until the hubbub has died down before he says, “Constable Collins, I presume?”

Collins gets off the table, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “That’s me.”

“Could I ask you to step outside for a minute? It’s about your fiancée.”

Collins’s face crumples like a deflating balloon. “Dot? Dear God, has something happened?”

“Oh no, no,” Jack hastens to reassure him, “nothing like that. It’s just that there’s something that merits your attention. If you’ll follow me, Constable?”

Collins trails him obligingly out of the pub. Jack is reminded a little of a puppy. He’s so young - he can’t be older than Jack was when he shipped out. “I didn’t get your name, sir,” he’s saying. “Are you from City Central?”

“Detective Inspector Jack Robinson. I’m not from City Central.” God, this is complicated.

“Which branch are - ” begins Collins, and is thankfully derailed by the sight of Dot standing outside the TARDIS, which has transformed into something shark-like and cherry-red. “Dottie! What are you doing here? It’s bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the wedding.”

“It’s an emergency, Hugh,” says Dot, clutching at her handbag like it is a rope hanging off a cliff’s edge. “I’ll need you to get in the car.”

“Wow,” says Collins, bug-eyed, “is that a Chevy Corvette?”

“Is it? Oh, I don’t know. Just get in the car, Hugh.”

“All right, Dottie, all right.” 

They wait until they hear the sound of Hugh screaming, “ _What the -_ ”

Jack holds the car door for Dot. “I think you’d better get in there.”

Dot fervently crosses herself.

*

“A restorative, miss?”

“You’re an angel, Mr B,” says Miss Fisher, snagging a snifter glass off the tray Mr Butler is proffering. “A nice angel, I mean, not the Weeping sort.”

While Dot and Collins have it out in the parlour, the rest of them have decamped to the kitchen to give the couple some semblance of privacy. TARDIS acoustics being what they are, however, they can still hear snatches of the row.

_“A year? You ran off on the eve of our wedding to spend a year gallivanting in space and you’re only telling me now?”_

_“Well, when could I have told you? I could hardly have said when we met that I was born four hundred years ago and had got stranded in time, you’d have sent me straight to an asylum!”_

_“Were you ever going to tell me?”_

_“I - ”_

_“You were never going to tell me! Really, Dottie, really?”_

“To be fair,” says Mac, “it is a lot.”

“It is quite shocking,” attests Jack, “the first time you see it. And I wasn’t even engaged to anyone then.”

“Still,” says Miss Fisher. “I don’t see that he has to go about screaming his head off.”

_“I should have listened to my mother about you! She said it was suspicious you weren’t inviting anyone from your side!”_

_“Your mother just hates me because I’m Catholic, Hugh.”_

_“Of course she does! I can’t believe I converted for this.”_

_“Oh, you will keep bringing that up, won’t you - ”_

_“She’s threatened not to come to the wedding! And I can’t say I blame her!”_

_“What do you mean, she’s not coming? Is nobody coming to this wedding?”_

_“Well, maybe there won’t even be a wedding, the way you’re carrying on - ”_

“I think marriage is overrated,” says Miss Fisher loftily. “Those two aren’t even married yet, and look at all this trouble they already have.”

“Amen,” says Mac, touching her glass to Miss Fisher’s.

“I could gainsay you,” says Jack, “but I’m really not in a position to argue for the institution of wedlock, so.”

There’s the slamming of a door. After a beat, Dot appears in the kitchen, sniffling. “Hugh’s run off.”

“Good riddance,” says Mac.

“No, it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have lied to him.”

“Darling Dot,” says Miss Fisher, folding her into her arms, “it’s just as much my fault for letting you get snatched by Angels, or whisking you out of 1969. He’ll come round.”

Jack sighs and gets up. “I’ll go after him.”

*

The TARDIS is parked amid several other cars by a cemetery. There is a group of teenagers perched on and around one car, listening to the radio and bobbing their heads in time to the beat, _got to be good looking ‘cause he’s so hard to see_. “Have you by any chance seen a crying policeman pass this way?” asks Jack.

One of the kids snorts. “Sure we did. He ran off that way through the tombstones.”

Collins is sitting dejectedly on a modest grave, his head in his hands. “It’s only me,” says Jack, approaching cautiously. 

“I guess you can sit, sir. It’s my dad; he won’t mind.”

“Thank you,” says Jack, sinking carefully onto the stone next to Collins. “I’m sorry.”

“It was a long time ago, when I was little,” says Collins. “He was wounded in the war and I suppose he never really got better. I would have liked Dottie to have met him; he would have loved her, I think.”

They sit in silence, listening to the crickets chirping in the night.

After a while, Collins says: “Is she going to go away again with Miss Fisher?”

“I don’t know,” says Jack. “I think that’s something the two of you have to work out together.”

“She’s - so much.” Collins spreads his hands to indicate some incredible breadth. “She’s so beautiful, and she’s so brave and good, and now I find out that she’s seen the universe and been through time and - how can I ever be enough, next to that? I can’t even make junior detective.”

“I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.”

“No, really, I tried. They gave the job to the deputy commissioner’s nephew.” Collins grimaces. “We can’t even afford a house of our own, and my mother won’t let us live in the bungalow since I converted. I couldn’t tell Dottie. I’m supposed to be the one providing for her, and I’m doing a bang-up job of it so far - of course she’s going to run off.”

“She came back for you,” says Jack. “That’s worth noting. You love her, don’t you?”

“So much,” says Collins fervently. “She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“Then you have to work at it,” says Jack. Had he ever been this young? God. “Believe me, if you think time travel is the biggest problem marriage can throw at you - it could get so much worse.”

“Are you and Miss Fisher married, sir?”

Jack coughs. “Ah. No. Why would you say that?”

“Only I thought - ”

“I’m divorced,” says Jack. “And I don’t think Miss Fisher has ever married. At least, not to my knowledge.”

“Oh,” says Collins. He looks awkwardly at his hands. “Sorry, sir.”

“Anyway,” says Jack, trying to salvage the subject, “my point is, have a good hard think about what you and Dot are doing. If you’re not up for making a serious go of it, I’d say not to bother.”

“Thanks, sir,” says Collins. “If you don’t mind me saying so, I wish you were at my branch. I feel I could learn a lot from someone like you.”

Ah, he might as well. “I am actually from City South. Just 40 years in the past.”

“Oh, right.” Collins waves his hands vaguely. “Because of the - the time travel thing. Right.”

Something is niggling at the back of Jack’s mind. Now that the main thrust of this conversation has been sorted, it rises to the surface like a bubble. “You said your father was wounded in the war.”

“Yes, sir.”

It doesn’t match up. Collins can’t be older than 25. There’s no way his father could have been in the war.

“Which company was he in?”

“Eighth Division, sir. He was wounded in ‘42 in Malaya - Japanese fire, it was.” And then, as Jack continues to stare at him in confusion, “In World War Two, sir.”

Jack says: “World War what?” 

*

For some time after that, he hears nothing. The world seems to have fallen silent. When the sound does come back, like a dial on a radio slowly being turned up, it’s to the sound of Miss Fisher’s heels clicking on the gravel, until she comes to where he is sitting on the low stone wall at the edge of the cemetery. He doesn’t look up.

“May I?” she says.

Jack wordlessly inclines his head. Miss Fisher perches on the wall next to him, spreading her skirts. 

“Hugh says he’s sorry - he didn’t mean to spoil you.”

“He couldn’t have known.”

“No,” agrees Miss Fisher. “But I should have realised this might happen, travelling so close to your immediate future.”

“I hope you don’t have a quota for existential crises aboard the TARDIS,” says Jack, “because I’m certain we’ve busted it.”

“We travel through time and space,” says Miss Fisher. “We’ve got room for a crisis or three.”

Jack picks at a loose seam on his cuff. “Could you tell me at least when it is?”

She slants a look of concern at him. “There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s a fixed point.”

“I just want to know when.”

She exhales. “1939. It ends in 1945.”

Ten years. Ten years from his own time. _I can’t go back to that,_ he thinks, _I can’t_ \- and yet another part of him knows he will have to. Jack Robinson, who could never leave well enough alone. “Is it worse?”

“Yes.” The moon has gone behind a cloud; the beautiful angles of her face are in shadow. In most kinds of light she looks no older than he does, but in the lee of the night like this, there are the depths of the centuries in her eyes. “It’s worse.”

Jack observes that his hands are trembling. He feels detached from the situation, as if it is something happening in the body of another person. “I don’t understand it,” he hears himself say. “If they had lived through one war already, why would they let another happen?”

“I wish I could tell you,” she says, “but it’s been so many years, and I still don’t know.”

“You were in a war yourself. Weren’t you?”

Miss Fisher doesn’t say anything for a long time. Finally she says, in a low voice: “I served in the last great Time War.”

“When was that?”

“It was fought across all of time,” says Miss Fisher, “though I suppose it lasted about 400 years in all. My entire homeworld was destroyed. A handful of us survived, though half of us still try to kill the other half from time to time.”

“Makes our war sound like a walk in the park.”

“Let’s not compare wars,” says Miss Fisher. “The worst war is always the one you were in.”

The wall is cool and mossy beneath his fingertips. There are letters carved into the stone; to stave off the shaking of his hands, he makes himself trace them. _Foo was here. WF ♥ RD. Come after me._ One is just a string of numbers: _290929 -_ a birthday, perhaps, or a death day _._ Some of them are old, older than the graves. What happened to all these people, he wonders. Did they go off to war, and did they come back the same?

Miss Fisher is studying the scratches in the wall. “It’s funny, the messages people choose to leave for the future.”

“If only we could leave ‘Stop what you’re doing’,” says Jack. “But no one would listen to that, would they?”

“Not in my experience, they d - ” Miss Fisher’s gaze seems to catch on something, but then she gives herself a little shake and slides off the wall, brushing herself down. “We’ll just have to do what we can, in the time that we have. Will you see me home, Inspector?”

The moon comes out as they leave the cemetery. The teenagers are still in their car, blasting the radio into the night. Miss Fisher laughs as she hears a new song come on, a slower one with a lingering twang: _Now I don’t hardly know her, but I think I could love her_. “I haven’t heard this song in ages!” she cries, and then she is unspooling from him to dance in the street. It’s a strange, swaying dance with little art and a lot of abandon. She is wearing a high-collared chartreuse number that flares above the knee, and enormous hoop earrings that bounce when she spins. The teenagers whoop in approval: “Yes ma’am!”

“Come on, Jack!” she calls.

Jack folds his arms and fights the smile threatening to curve his lips. “I don’t dance, Miss Fisher.” He does; he just hasn’t since the war.

“It’s easy,” says Miss Fisher. “Here.” She reaches for him, reels him in. “Like that,” she breathes in his ear, “just let go, like that.” He can see the curve of her arm in the moonlight, the glint of an earring, the length of her lashes. The radio warbles, _crimson and clover, over and over_. He follows her time. They sway in the street, slow and close.

*

Dot says: “I’d like you to give me away at the wedding, miss.”

“Why, Dot,” says Miss Fisher. “I would be honoured. You look absolutely lovely - did you make this?”

Dot blushes, as Mr Butler fusses for the umpteenth time with the flowers in her hair. “I worked on it in my room in the year after I left 1969. I’d bought a dress before, but it didn’t sit right with me to get married in something from a store.”

“Look at you,” says Miss Fisher fondly. “Remember when you first came to me? You were such a shy little thing. You wouldn’t even touch any of the equipment, you were convinced electricity was the devil’s work.”

Dot laughs. “Oh, miss. You made me brave, and you made me happy. And I’ll always have that, whatever happens.”

“If you carry on like this, you’ll make me cry,” says Miss Fisher. She’s wearing a gown that looks like liquid gold poured onto her body; most brides would ban it at the threshold lest it steal their thunder, but Dot does not seem to mind one bit. “Now let’s get you to that church before my liner runs.”

Jack offers to escort Mac into the church, but she simply tucks her hands into her pockets and strolls ahead of him, so he follows suit. Mr Butler takes up the rear. He is, Jack has been informed, actually being projected from the slender device inside Mac’s jacket, and makes for quite an unremarkable wedding guest provided he does not dematerialise in public. 

They all file into Dot’s side of the church, otherwise conspicuously empty compared to Collins’ - filled mostly with the chaps Jack saw down at the pub the other night, now sorely hung over. Jack casts an eye over the crowd for anyone who looks like Collins’ mother and comes up short. This is perhaps partly why Collins, up front in his best suit, looks like he is waiting his turn with the firing squad. Then his entire visage changes as he sees Dot come down the aisle. 

Jack is not a sentimental man by nature. He suffered through the last wedding he attended - Rosie’s and Fletcher’s - and his own is so distant in that other life of his that it might as well be an episode in a storybook. But there’s something so pure and marvellous about the way Collins and Dot look as they join hands before their priest and speak their vows, like the light at the beginning of the world, as yet untrampled by history.

“I’m sure it’s all heteronormative guff,” says Mac, “but I find myself weirdly moved nevertheless.”

“It happens to the best of us,” Jack tells her.

The congregation breaks out into applause and cheers as Collins lifts Dot’s veil and kisses her. Jack turns to Miss Fisher to see if she is, indeed, crying, but she is staring out of the window instead.

“Miss Fisher?”

“Jack,” says Miss Fisher, rising slowly with her eyes still trained on something outside the window, “when we came into the church this morning, how many statues were there in the yard?”

“None,” says Jack. “Why?” He stands to look too.

There are ten statues in a row outside the church. Angels, with their hands clasped over their eyes.

“Jack,” says Miss Fisher, “whatever you do, don’t blink.”

*

Mayhem is unfolding behind him. Dot and Collins are trying to shepherd the congregation into the church’s cellar, with instructions to keep the lights on and to bar the door behind them. “But will they be all right?” Dot is saying frantically. 

“The Angels don’t want them, they want the TARDIS,” says Miss Fisher. “We’re going to have to make a run for it, and they’re going to come after us when they do. Mr Butler, could you go get the engine ready?” 

“Yes, miss.”

Jack’s eyes are beginning to water from staring at the Angels. “Miss Fisher!”

“I’ve got it covered,” he hears Mac say, just as his eyes close involuntarily. Mac swears. “Did you say there were ten?”

Jack opens his eyes and counts nine Angels. “Damn it.”

“Are they secure?” Miss Fisher is saying. “Right, let’s go. I need someone in the aisle watching the door.”

“I’ll do it,” says Dot. She squares her shoulders as Miss Fisher and Jack prepare to fling open the doors to the chapel. “Three, two, one - ”

Dot inhales sharply, but keeps her eyes open. The Angel in the doorway has lowered its hands and bared its teeth, revealing impossibly long stone fangs.

“Out, out, out!” Miss Fisher is shouting as Jack ducks around the Angel and races for the front doors. “You too, Mac, come on! I’ve got it, Dot, now you.” Dot pushes past her as Collins helps Mac shut and bar the chapel doors, only for them to rattle with enormous force.

“It won’t hold the Angel for long,” says Miss Fisher, darting past him, “we’d better - oh, bloody hell.”

The TARDIS, parked down the hill from the church, has been swarmed with Angels. They have flung themselves around it, stone limbs entwining its roof and doors, arms outstretched and teeth bared.

“What happens if they get the TARDIS?” asks Jack. 

“They could cause enough damage to switch off the sun. The moment we open that door, they’ll get in.”

“Someone has to stay up here to watch them,” Jack realises. 

“I’ll do it,” says Collins.

Dot turns to him, stricken. “ _We’ll_ do it. I’m not leaving you behind, Hugh.”

There’s the sound of wood splintering behind them. “Oh for God’s sake, you idiots,” says Jack, “I’ll do it. Now run.”

Miss Fisher is already sprinting down the hill, faster than seems possible in those heels of hers. She edges around the thicket of Angel hands reaching out for her and opens the TARDIS door with her key.

Mac is next, careful not to touch the Angels. Collins helps Dot into the car, turns to look back at Jack and freezes.

“Sir!” he calls out, his voice full of terror.

“It’s behind me, isn’t it?” says Jack.

Collins nods, eyes wide.

Jack does the math. If he starts down the hill now, he loses the ability to keep all the Angels around the TARDIS in sight. One or more of them may get to Collins, even into the TARDIS, which would be the end of everything. If Collins shuts the door, the Angel behind Jack will get him. His eyes feel like they’re on fire.

“Go!” he shouts down the hill. 

“I can’t do that, sir!”

“Collins,” says Jack, putting all the steel he can into his voice, “go be with your wife. That’s an order.”

Collins bites his lip. Then he slams the door shut.

Jack blinks.

*

Jack blinks.

He’s lying face-down in the wet grass. His head feels as if it’s been juiced like an orange. He staggers to his feet, then is viciously sick in a puddle. 

“You all right, mate?”

The worried voice comes from a man in a builder’s cap and overalls. Jack looks over his shoulder to see a construction site where the church was. 

“What’s the date?” he says thickly.

“Um,” says the man, flummoxed. “The fourteenth.”

“The year, man, the year!”

“1929, all right? You might want to go easy on the sauce, mate.”

1929\. The Angel has put him back where he was, back in the life he was meant to lead: ten years after what he thought was the war to end all wars, ten years before the next.

Jack begins to laugh hysterically.

*

It turns out that by the standards of 1929, he’s only been gone a week. Everyone down at the station simply assumes he took that leave the Acting Commissioner recommended. His house is a little dusty, the garden a tad overgrown - nothing an afternoon with some shears won’t fix. He’s incredulous at how easily his life slots back into its everyday groove, as if a strange woman had never plucked him out of it and swept him off to see the stars.

He solves a number of thefts and two wholly unremarkable murders. He does a tedious amount of paperwork. He puts some effort into the garden, plants new bulbs, trims the hedge. He doesn’t count the days, doesn’t keep an ear out for the sound of the TARDIS arriving.

“Something’s different about you,” says Rosie. One of his better discoveries on returning to 1929 has been that he might actually be able to be friends with his ex-wife, whom it feels like he hasn’t seen in ages, though for her it’s only been a week. They’re in his garden, drinking tea. She looks a little wan still, but the kernel of her is reviving; she’s looking at flats to rent, she’s told him, and she would appreciate a second eye but he needn’t feel obliged. Jack has agreed to accompany her on some viewings next weekend. It is not as if he has anything better to do.

“You’ve that distant look,” she goes on, “that people get after they’ve been away on their holidays. Where was it you went, anyway?”

“Fishing,” says Jack.

She takes a sip of tea. “Catch anything good?”

“Some.” Jack stares into his own teacup. “But I threw it back.”

It’s another week before he goes out on an evening walk after work and finds his feet have taken him to the cemetery. It isn’t as full as it was when he last saw it; the graves are spread out at the fringes. Collins’ father isn’t in here yet; he’s out there somewhere, younger than Collins was in 1969, unaware of what life holds for him. The place where his grave will be is still green sward. 

Jack slows when he comes to the low wall at the edge of the cemetery. It seems newly laid. There aren’t any scratches on it at all. He stares at the blankness of it, something like hope beginning to unfurl in his chest.

He takes out his pocketknife, gets down on his knees by the wall and begins.

The sun has gone down entirely by the time he finishes. He nicks his fingers a couple of times in the dark. He sucks at the cut on his left index finger and goes over all of it one more time, just in case. It needs to last at least forty years. 

Then he sits on the wall and waits.

It’s almost midnight when he hears it: that unmistakable whoosh and wheeze. A light appears, weaving its way through the dark mass of the graves like a will o’ the wisp. It’s her, still in the gold dress she wore to the wedding. She’s running. “Jack!” she is shouting. “Jack!”

“Over here, Miss Fisher!”

She skids to a stop in front of him, breathing hard.

“You came,” he says dumbly.

Miss Fisher gestures, still trying to catch her breath, at the message he has carved into the wall: _290929 come after me - JR._ “You asked.”

“I didn’t know if you’d remember.”

“I didn’t know if it _was_ your message,” she shoots back. “When Hugh came in and told me we’d left you in 1969 to be snatched by Angels, I thought - oh, how _dare_ you, Jack Robinson!”

“The nerve of me,” agrees Jack.

“You could have been stuck wandering the prehistoric ages, for all we knew - ”

“It was a considerate Angel. It put me back where you first found me.”

“I thought we’d lost you,” she says.

The moment between them stretches out long and fine, like a thread of gossamer. Miss Fisher draws a sharp, uneven breath. He is startled to see that she seems genuinely shaken. “Jack, I - ”

“Inspector?” More lights down by the path, people calling. “Sir?”

Jack blinks. “Please tell me that’s not Dot wading through a graveyard in her wedding dress.”

“It’s all right, I found him!” Miss Fisher calls back to them. “Don’t get in the mud, Dot!” When she turns back to him, she is all verve and business once more. “As it happens, Inspector, there are some Weeping Angels I left quantum-locked in 1969, and I could use some help in making an arrest.” She reaches out to him. “Coming?”

Jack takes her hand.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Phryne is in fact somewhat behind the times in quoting “A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop, a-wop-bam-boom!” from Little Richard’s 1955 hit Tutti Frutti - it would be like quoting Hollaback Girl in 2019 - but she probably doesn’t care very much.
> 
> The song that plays in the bar when Jack goes looking for Collins is [Honky Tonk Women](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61jfm219ArA) by The Rolling Stones; the song he hears before he enters the cemetery is [Come Together](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45cYwDMibGo) by The Beatles. Both were number one hits in Australia in 1969. The song Phryne dances to is [Crimson And Clover](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpGEeneO-t0) \- the Tommy James & the Shondells original, though I personally prefer the Joan Jett & the Blackhearts cover. I tested about a dozen songs by dancing to them in my room before settling on this one.


	4. in which it seemed always afternoon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Sad Time Lords Drinking Society hits the beach.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _In the afternoon they came unto a land  
>  In which it seemed always afternoon.  
> All round the coast the languid air did swoon,  
> Breathing like one that hath a weary dream._  
> \- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘The Lotos-Eaters’

“Welcome,” cries Donna Noble, “to the Sad Time Lords Drinking Society!”

The beach stretches as far as the eye can see. There seems to be nobody else on it. The sand is black; Jack has discovered it is rough beneath the toes, like gravel. The sea is a rich and iridescent blue; the sky above it clear and serene. A breeze ruffles the thatched roof of the bar at which they are all seated. From the radio behind the counter issue the tinny strains of a zither.

“I move to rename the society,” says the Doctor. He’s a tall, skinny man in a pin-striped suit and an outlandish pair of shoes, who looks like he stuck his fingers in a plug socket and still hasn’t burned off the energy. He and Donna emerged from a blue edifice labelled POLICE BOX, which is now sitting modestly on the beach next to Miss Fisher’s TARDIS, once more a Hispano-Suiza. Miss Fisher has introduced the Doctor as “my oldest friend, literally, he’s got a century or so on me”. 

“Quite,” says Miss Fisher, “we are hardly sad - I am always merry, for one - and only one of us identifies as a Time Lord at present.”

“And he is not sad,” puts in the Doctor.

“Rubbish,” says Donna. “Get a couple of drinks in you and you’ll be all mopey again.” 

“Anyway,” says the Doctor. He is sipping a complex cocktail out of a coconut, too violently coloured to actually be from the coconut, through a twisty straw. “To business. Present: the Doctor, tenth incarnation; the Fisher, third - honestly, how are you only on your third one?”

“Clean and virtuous living,” says Miss Fisher demurely over her sidecar.

Mac snorts into her glass. “Hallelujah.”

“Companions,” the Doctor continues dictating minutes to an invisible secretary, “Donna Noble - ” Donna makes a mock-bow “ - Dr MacMillan, good-looking, ginger _and_ an actual doctor, I hope my future regenerations are taking note - ”

“I’m flattered,” says Mac. “I think.”

“ - and Detective Inspector Jack Robinson, whose first time it is at the Drinking Society of Time Persons of Various Moods and Genders.” The Doctor beams at him. “When did she pick you up from, then?”

“The 1920s,” says Jack.

“Oh, we just went, didn’t we, Donna? Lovely time.”

“I mean, there was a murder,” says Donna. “Quite a few murders, actually. Also, a giant wasp. Oh, and the Doctor got poisoned.”

“And we met Agatha Christie!” exclaims the Doctor. “Great stuff.”

“Yes,” says Jack. “That sounds exactly like what goes on in the 1920s.”

The Doctor glances around. “Where is Dot?”

“On her honeymoon,” says Miss Fisher. “Which is why I picked this spot for us to meet, as it happens, I left her and Hugh on the island for a romantic weekend. They’ll come meet us here when they’re ready.”

“Beach vacation,” says the Doctor. “Love it. Now where were we?”

*

Miss Fisher and the Doctor seem to be going through a laundry list of their nemeses, as one does. “The Master?” says Miss Fisher.

“Still dead,” says the Doctor shortly. “The Professor?” 

“Still imprisoned in Stormcage, last I checked,” says Miss Fisher darkly, “and I hope he rots there. The Rani?”

“Haven’t heard from her in ages. Think she’s angling to get her own planet; we should keep an eye on that. The Matron?”

“Ugh. She seems to have settled down in the early 1800s, where she’s terrorising the ton. I’d avoid that time period, if I were you - she despairs of me but she despises you.”

“Not summoned you yet?”

Miss Fisher shudders. “Don’t jinx it.”

Jack scratches idly at the back of his neck. There’s something itching there, just out of sight. Sunburn, perhaps. “Is there anything on my neck?” he asks Mac.

Mac glances over. “No, you’re good.” She rises. “I’m getting another drink, want one?”

“I’m all right, thanks.” Jack briefly wonders where she plans to get her drink. There is nobody behind the bar. In fact, he doesn’t remember where his own drink came from. 

He looks back down at his glass, which is full.

“Hm,” he says, to no one but himself.

*

The sun continues to burn on the sea. The water is cool between his toes. “So how was Dot’s wedding, then?” asks Donna, as they stroll along the shore.

“It was quite nice,” says Jack, “up to the part where it was crashed by Weeping Angels.”

“Ugh. Haven’t met those, though the Doctor’s had some run-ins.” She jerks her head back towards the bar, where the Doctor is having a heated argument with Miss Fisher about quantum physics, wearily adjudicated by Mac. “He ruined _my_ wedding, you know.”

“Did he now.”

“But it turned out my husband-to-be was dosing me with weird particles so he could feed me to a bunch of alien spiders.” Donna shrugs. “So it was all for the best. That’s what I tell myself when I think about being 37 and single. Bit hard to date aboard a TARDIS, and all that. You’re not single, are you?”

Jack considers. “I suppose I am.”

Donna jogs him with her elbow. “We should hook up!” And then, as Jack coughs into his drink, “Joking! You should see your face. Nah, you’re obviously besotted with the Fisher.”

“Um,” says Jack uncomfortably. “Am I?”

“God, all that staring you two do. Wouldn’t be allowed in _our_ TARDIS; some of us have allergies. No, she’s hooked you good and proper - they don’t call her the Fisher for nothing.” Donna kicks a foot through the black sand. “Figures. Only fit bloke I’ve met in a while and he’s gone on his own Time Person. Oh well.”

“You and the Doctor - ”

“God, no.” Donna actually shudders. “Kissed him the other day to save his life - you know you always run into those moments - was like snogging my own brother. Anyway, he’s still hung up about this other girl who used to travel with him. Rose, her name was.”

“What happened to her?”

“From what I have gathered,” says Donna carefully, “they saved the world but then she ended up stuck in a parallel universe. I hope that’s not what _you_ have to look forward to.”

“It’s complicated enough as it is.” Jack looks up and down the beach. “This really is a very secluded spot. I wonder where all the other people are?”

“God knows,” says Donna. “ _I’m_ not complaining. Can’t abide tourists.”

*

“What else is there to do on this island?” The Doctor has found some brochures on the bartop and is leafing through them. “Look, they’ve got caldera cruises. Want to go on a caldera cruise, Donna?”

“No more volcanoes,” says Donna.

“But these aren’t even active!” 

“That’s what you said last time.” 

“The middle of the island has some very good vineyards.” Miss Fisher is sunning herself on a deckchair, resplendent in a cream and gold chiffon dress and an enormous floppy hat. Jack politely avoids looking at her legs, though she seems keen to present them to all and sundry. “Oh, and the sunset view on the north cliffs! Divine.”

“Apparently there are some ruins just down that way,” says the Doctor, squinting at a map. “Bronze Age and everything. Got a 4,000-year-old toilet, they have.”

“We have both actually been to the Bronze Age,” points out Miss Fisher, “and neither of us enjoyed it very much.”

Jack looks down into his martini and is puzzled to see reflected on its surface Hugh Collins, waving frantically and mouthing something. He blinks. The image has dissolved.

“Windsurfing!” exclaims the Doctor.

*

“It’s because you never engage the stabilisers,” Miss Fisher is saying over the Doctor’s protestations, “that’s why you’re always on the skids - ”

“You’re one to talk! You’re the most reckless driver I know.”

“But I always get where I mean to go!” Miss Fisher sucks a glacé cherry off the stem with a pop. 

“I always get where I’m needed,” says the Doctor loftily.

“They needn’t be _mutually exclusive_ ,” huffs Miss Fisher. “I mean, what about the time you stood me up in New Byzantium? You were off by five years!”

“You formed a cult while you were waiting!”

“I was _bored!”_

“I swear they have this fight every time they meet,” says Donna, not quite sotto voce. “They’ll be threatening to drunk-race each other next, just you watch.”

“They can’t spend too much time with one another,” says Mac philosophically. “They’ve both got to be the centre of attention, and if the two of them stay too long in one place together, the room will combust from the drama.”

Donna clinks glasses with her.

“All right,” says Miss Fisher, springing to her feet, “race you around the island, last one back here buys the next round.”

“You’re on!” shouts the Doctor. “Allons-y!”

“Ah, here we go.” Mac gets up, presumably to head them off.

The Doctor and Miss Fisher march across the sand to their respective TARDISes and fling open their doors.

“Oh,” says the Doctor. He is looking into the interior of a police box, which contains a fire extinguisher, a first-aid kit and a perfectly ordinary telephone.

“Hang on,” says Miss Fisher, head in the Hispano-Suiza, “where did it g - ”

*

“ - going down to Canterbury,” Miss Fisher is saying. “I thought we were all just telling funny stories to pass the time, I didn’t know Geoff was going to write them all down. Don’t know why he said I had five husbands. It’s not like I actually married any of them.”

They are all lying on the deckchairs again. “Is it just me,” Jack whispers, “or is something not right?”

“I can’t put my finger on it,” Mac whispers back. “It’s like it’s there in the corner of my vision, but when I focus on it, there’s nothing.”

“Why are we whispering?” Donna wants to know. 

“In case something’s listening in,” says Jack.

Donna shuffles her deckchair closer to his. “Whatever it is, the two of them have got it the worst.”

“So I said to Michelangelo,” the Doctor is saying, “‘Is that a snail on your face, or are you just happy to see me?’”

“I think whatever is doing this is focusing on them,” says Jack, “and we’re collateral. We should try to get off the beach.”

“We could just each take one direction and walk that way,” says Mac.

“What if we get lost?” says Donna.

“It’s a beach,” says Jack. “How hard can it be?”

*

“Right,” says Mac, “so there’s no way off the beach.”

“I got impassable cliff face,” says Jack. “You?”

“Same.”

“Remember the Doctor said something about ruins?” says Donna. “I think they were in the direction I was going. But I couldn’t go where the ruins were, for some reason.”

“Like a force field?” says Mac.

“No, more like - ” Donna thinks. “You know when you’re in a dream and you want to do something really simple, like open your eyes or stand up, but it’s just the hardest thing to do? A bit like that.”

“Squid,” the Doctor is saying, arms akimbo, “have the biggest eyes on the planet. The size of dinner plates.”

“Whatever for?” asks Miss Fisher.

“To see the whales coming, of course.”

“Oh.” Miss Fisher considers this. “I think that’s eminently sensible.”

“So it’s something to do with the ruins, but we can’t get to the ruins,” Jack muses. “What about the water?”

“Be my guest,” says Mac.

Jack sighs and starts to unbutton his shirt.

“Oh, _well_ ,” says Donna with feeling. “I can get behind _that_.”

“And Phryne’s not even paying attention,” says Mac. “That’s how you know something’s really wrong.”

The water is strangely, deliciously cool. Jack wades in up to his waist. It’s so clear he can see his toes struggling for purchase on the black sand. He takes a deep breath and dives.

There’s nothing in the water, he observes as he swims out in careful, quick strokes. There are no shells in the seabed, no strands of kelp, not even the tiniest fish. It’s just him, a lone shadow moving over a silent expanse. 

He resurfaces about a furlong out to sea. Donna and Mac are two anxious figures on the shore. He turns back towards the horizon and sees, rising out of nowhere, a vast wave of deepest blue. He barely has time to draw breath before it crashes over him.

*

“I didn’t order this,” says Mac, staring at the daiquiri in front of her.

The three of them are sitting at the empty bar. Jack looks down at himself. He is perfectly dry.

“What was I doing?” he asks.

Donna squints at him. “You went for a walk. No, for a swim!” She frowns. “Why?”

“I hate daiquiris,” says Mac.

“We’re all that’s left,” says the Doctor.

Jack, Mac and Donna turn to him. The Doctor and Miss Fisher are sitting in a corner booth. The Doctor is twirling a paper umbrella listlessly between his fingers. Miss Fisher is watching him, sombre. “I killed them,” says the Doctor.

“You did what you had to do,” says Miss Fisher.

“I’d have killed you too.” The Doctor crumples up the paper umbrella. “You do know that, don’t you? If the Professor hadn’t escaped when he did, if you hadn’t left the war to hunt him across the universe - you would have been there that day, and I would have destroyed you with the rest of them.”

“I know,” says Miss Fisher. She puts her hand on his. “I’m glad it was you in the end. I don’t know if I could have done it, if it had been up to me.”

“Oh no,” says Donna quietly. “It’s the Sad Time Lord Drinking Society.”

*

The radio crackles, before settling back into the zither’s aggravating refrain. “They’re both running a little hot,” says Mac, taking the Doctor’s pulse. He and Miss Fisher are ignoring her completely. “Pupils dilated. Other than that, there’s nothing physically the matter with them.”

Jack and Donna are searching the rest of the bar. “Very well-stocked on the alcohol front,” observes Jack, “and nothing else.” 

“There’s not even a sink,” says Donna. “Where they do the washing-up, I’d like to know.”

The radio crackles again. “... _millan? Inspector_?”

Jack holds out a hand. “Do you hear that?”

The voice is coming in over the radio, busy with static and barely audible over the strains of the zither. “ _Donna? Can you hear me_?”

“Is that Dot?” says Mac. She cranks up the volume on the radio.

There is a burst of static. Then Dot comes through again: “... _found you all like this…_ ”

“Dot!” shouts Jack. “Can you hear us, Dot?”

“ _...Hugh’s trying to...Miss Fisher’s all...the ruins…_ ”

“Did she say the ruins?” Donna dives for the brochures. “I knew it had to do with the ruins!”

“ _...really sorry about this_ …” The zither returns with a vengeance, now obnoxiously loud.

“Right,” says Jack. “Let’s find those ruins.”

*

Miss Fisher’s head lolls against Jack’s collar. She murmurs something into his shirt and then turns her face into the fabric. The Doctor, who has his arms looped around Mac and Donna’s shoulders, mumbles something in response.

“That’s not English, is it?” says Jack.

“Think it’s Gallifreyan. Their mother tongue.” Donna pauses to adjust her grip on the Doctor. “For an alien streak of nothing, he’s well heavy. The ruins should be up around here - can you see them?”

Jack can feel them. Just trying to look at them is like dragging one’s body out of paralysis. It’s taking everything out of him to just stand there in the face of them and not drop Miss Fisher.

The Doctor collapses, bringing Mac and Donna down with him in a tangle of limbs. “Oh god,” gasps Mac. “Somebody _really_ doesn’t want us getting in there.”

Jack tries to take one step forward, then another. It’s like battling a gale. In his arms, Miss Fisher lets out a small sob.

“Jack,” says Mac. “You’re on fire.”

Jack looks down at himself. He is, indeed, aflame, though Miss Fisher is not. “So I am.”

Everyone spends a few more seconds just staring at him. Then a flash of pain wracks his entire body, and he does drop Miss Fisher.

*

Jack comes to, shuddering in the hot grip of agony. Dot is standing over him with the stun gun, saying frantically: “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry! I used the lowest setting!”

Jack crawls onto all fours, coughing furiously. It is incredibly dusty, he notes, and then he realises they are in the ruins. Mac and Donna are sprawled next to him, still unconscious. 

“We came to the bar to meet you, like Miss Fisher said,” Dot is babbling, “only none of you were there, it was just the TARDISes, so we went to look for you and we found you all here like this with, well. That.” She points.

Jack looks up and sees an enormous web stretching between two ancient pillars. He can just about make out the Doctor and Miss Fisher, cocooned in white, sticky strands and folded into the web. 

And then there is the spider. It is the size of a taxicab, crouched angrily on a crumbling wall and hissing like a kettle at what appears to be a suit of armour, which is keeping it at bay with a flamethrower.

“Is that Collins in the armour?” says Jack, stumbling to his feet.

“We found it in the gallery, we didn’t have time to grab anything else.” Dot turns the stun gun on Donna, who comes awake screaming. 

Jack begins to climb the web. It is incredibly sticky and gruesome. He gets level with Miss Fisher, says, “Pardon me” - even though she cannot hear him and probably would not care anyway - and gropes for the dagger which she keeps strapped to her thigh. 

It’s messy work, cutting her free while dangling from a web, but then Mac and Donna are there to catch her as he lowers her down, before working his way over to the Doctor to do the same.

“Dottie!” shouts Collins, muffled under the helmet. “I’m almost out!”

“Get me the Doctor,” says Dot, bustling over. Before the Doctor is even fully on the ground, she has ratcheted up the settings on the stun gun and blasted him.

The Doctor emits an eldritch howl and sits bolt upright. “Ooh, that tingles.” His eyes focus. “Dot! How was your honeymoon?”

“It was very nice, thank you,” says Dot, “only if you could sort that spider out before it eats my husband, that would be lovely.”

“Gotcha.” The Doctor pulls, of all things, a pair of spectacles out of his pocket and puts them on to regard the spider.

“How does that help?” says Jack.

“They make me feel clever,” says the Doctor. “Ah, an Arachypnid! Haven’t seen one of those in ages. They eat dreams - the older the prey, the better. We must have been quite a treat. Hand me the Fisher’s sonic?”

Dot pats the prone Miss Fisher down with more alacrity than Jack might have managed and pulls out the gold cigarette holder. 

“Her settings are so fiddly,” complains the Doctor, twisting it furiously. He advances on the spider.

“Aren’t you going to wake Miss Fisher?” asks Jack as Dot holsters the stun gun.

“Oh, no. Miss Fisher is terribly afraid of spiders.”

“Ah.” Jack watches the spider rear up on its hind legs, chittering. “I can see how that might be problematic.”

“It’s best if she doesn’t remember this part,” agrees Dot.

The Doctor passes Collins, whose flamethrower is sputtering. The Doctor claps him on the shoulder in a comradely fashion, then pulls out a sonic device of his own. He aligns it with Miss Fisher’s and aims them both at the spider.

There is a discordant shrieking sound, and one of the spider’s legs falls off. 

“You’ve been in our heads,” the Doctor tells it, “and you know who we are. So, from one last creature of its kind to another - you’ve had your fill, now back off.”

The spider hisses. Then, ponderously, it retreats into the shadows of the ruins until only the tiniest gleam of its eyes is visible.

“Right,” says the Doctor under his breath, “now let’s bugger off before it sees me fall over.”

*

“The next time we get drinks,” says the Doctor, “I’m picking the venue.”

“I come here all the time,” protests Miss Fisher, massaging her temples. “How was I to know this would be the one instant we would get shanghaied by a giant dream-eating spider?” She shudders.

They are all sitting on the black sand beach. The sky is overcast and the sea is speckled with flotsam and cigarette butts. Donna sneezes.

“If we were only drinking dream alcohol,” says Mac, “why are we all having real hangovers?”

“Nope,” says the Doctor. “No logic now. It hurts too much. Oh, bless,” he adds to Dot, who has come round with a thermos and started handing out cups of tea.

“Let’s not do this again for a while,” says Miss Fisher, picking a strand of web off her sleeve with distaste.

“Let’s not,” agrees the Doctor. “Same time next year?”

Donna raises her cup of tea. “To the Sad Time Lord Drinking Society!”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the Doctor Who timeline, this meeting would take place some time after The Unicorn And The Wasp.
> 
> The beach in this episode is based on the black volcanic beach of Perissa on the island of Santorini. There is a really great bar there called Tranquilo, which to my knowledge is not a mirage trap. It is in the vicinity of the Bronze Age ruins of Akrotiri, which do not house a giant spider.
> 
> The zither playing on the radio sounds like the [Harry Lime Theme](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oEsWi88Qv0) that Anton Karas composed for The Third Man. In The Third Man Museum in Vienna, there are 420 covers of this theme and while I love the film, I imagine the soundtrack to purgatory to be all of the covers on loop.
> 
> Phryne is implying she was the inspiration for the Wife of Bath in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales - this being the woman who delivers the original Vagina Monologues, medieval edition - although then again, she maintains she was no one’s wife.
> 
> Michelangelo, besides being one of the greatest artists who ever lived, was also a massive troll who wrote ridiculous poems with snail metaphors in his free time.
> 
> Things that are now in my Internet search history: “Can you defibrillate someone with a stun gun?” The answer, friends, is no.


	5. more distant than stars and nearer than the eye

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jack meets Jane Ross out of order and out of time, but - spoilers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _What is this face, less clear and clearer  
>  The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger —   
> Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye   
> Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet  
> Under sleep, where all the waters meet._  
> \- T. S. Eliot, ‘Marina’

Always, the running. There is really a ridiculous amount of running involved, thinks Jack, as he sprints down one of the innumerable corridors of the ancient tomb of Baqqiri, trailed by badly winded archaeologists. There’s a lava pit at the end of it, because of course there is. Jack leaps over it. Then he has to pause to ensure none of the archaeologists falls into the lava, although he has a few uncharitable thoughts about how that wouldn’t be so bad, since the whole thing is their fault.

“This way!” he shouts, as they round the corner and glimpse daylight at the end of a long hall. They burst out into the open just as the entire tomb shakes ominously and a sinister susurration fills the air. 

“That would be the armies of the dead coming through the portal you opened with the Dagger of Khorana,” Jack informs the archaeologists reproachfully as they all try to catch their breath. 

“Where’s that woman?” shouts the lead archaeologist. “She took my emerald!”

Jack sighs. Miss Fisher is off restoring the Emerald of Amaradz to its rightful place in the inner chamber of the god-emperor, from whence she will retrieve the Dagger of Khorana, close the portal and hopefully stop whatever apocalypse is brewing. Come to think of it, she might need a hand.

“Stay here, don’t get crushed by falling rocks and don’t fall off the cliff,” he tells the archaeologists, and heads back into the tomb.

He has got past the lava pit, the gauntlet with the spikes and the room where the walls suddenly shoot flame, when he hears guttural moans ahead and sees shadowy figures loping around the corner. 

Jack’s pistol does not have enough bullets left to take on the armies of the dead. He is contemplating the odds of running in a different direction, when a young woman dives out of another corridor and rolls across the floor and into a crouch, the rifle in her hands already locked and loaded. Her first volley takes out the vanguard; they have barely crumbled into dust before she’s on her feet, racing past him and shouting: “This way!”

Jack follows, bemused. She’s not one of the archaeologists; certainly she seems to know what she’s doing. They skid around a corner just in time to see one of the shadow warriors hurl a spear at them; she drops to her knees, letting it pass over her head. Jack fires down the corridor, turning the spear-thrower into dust.

“Good shot!” exclaims the young woman, and then she takes a closer look at him and gasps. “Jack? Is that you?” Jack barely has breath to respond before she flings her arms abruptly around his neck.

“It’s so good to see you,” she says, muffled into his collar. “I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again.”

Jack stares at her when she pulls away. She has straw-coloured hair bundled out of the way in a plait and a quicksilver intelligence in her eyes. He would place her in her mid-twenties. He has no idea who she is. 

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says. “This must be the first time for you. How silly of me!” She visibly composes herself, then fixes him with a practised smile. “I’m Jane Ross. I expect you came with my mother.”

“Wh - ” begins Jack, and then he hears Miss Fisher shouting for him. 

“In here!” call Jane and Jack at the same time.

Miss Fisher comes striding down the corridor - she’s not running, which must mean she has sorted out the portal - and ducks into the antechamber where they are ensconced. She exclaims with delight. “Jane, darling! Fancy seeing you on Astrazan. How’d you come?”

Jane waves her wrist, which appears to have a bulky wristwatch strapped to it. “Vortex manipulator. Doing a bit of freelance work for the Agency - I’m here to pick up that dagger for safekeeping, before it opens up any more portals while it’s loose.”

“What in the world led you to entertain those idiots? Oh, no, don’t tell me.” Miss Fisher holds up a finger. “Spoilers.”

“Quite,” says Jane. “Shall we do diaries?”

“Yes, let’s,” says Miss Fisher, and then, completely ignoring the fact that they are in a booby-trapped tomb surrounded by the dust of the newly redeceased armies of the dead, they produce diaries from somewhere on their persons and proceed to compare them. Miss Fisher’s is gold with black accents and Jane’s is black with gold accents. 

“So you’re twenty-six,” Miss Fisher is saying. “Got your doctorate yet?”

“Last September,” says Jane proudly. “You took me to see the Singing Fountains and bought me a laser crossbow.”

“Good idea, me,” says Miss Fisher, scribbling furiously. “Well, well, Dr Ross.”

Jane bows with a flourish. Then she asks, “How long has Jack been with you?”

Both of them turn to look at Jack. He says, self-consciously: “Give or take a month.”

“Ah,” says Jane. She makes a note. “Still early days, then.”

Miss Fisher narrows her eyes speculatively at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Mm,” says Jane. “Spoilers. Shall we get out of here?”

The archaeologists, Jack notes with some relief, are still intact; they are sitting in the shade of some thorn trees, looking dazed. Miss Fisher hands the Dagger of Khorana to Jane, who tucks into her pack. “Can I give you a lift anywhere?”

“It’s all right, I’ve got a ride coming.” Jane gives her a swift peck on the cheek, then moves to the edge of the cliff that the tomb is located on. She takes out a coil of rope and begins looping it around a tree stump, tying off the ends in a complicated knot. Jack watches her work, unsettled: this capable, cryptic young woman who lives in a world of time beyond him. 

“Double overhand knot,” she says, with a quick smile over her shoulder at him.

“Miss Fisher taught you how to tie those, did she?” 

A strange look passes over Jane’s face, like a cloud; it’s gone in a second. “No,” she says, “you did.”

There’s the sound of a train whistle. The train is hurtling towards them across the plains below the cliff face. “Here’s my ride,” says Jane. “I wish we could talk more, but it’s never safe to meet too long out of order like this. Still, it’s nice to see you, Jack.”

“Wait,” says Jack. “What did you mean back there, when you said you didn’t think you’d ever see me again?”

The train is close now. Jane smiles, a small, sad smile. “I can’t. Spoilers.” She nods towards Miss Fisher. “Look after her.” Then she picks up the rope, backs up and runs in a long arc towards the edge of the cliff. She somersaults into the air, graceful as a wood thrush, and dives.

Jack leans over the edge to see her swing onto the roof of the train, releasing the rope and rolling onto her feet in a perfect stop. She stands, a diminishing figure silhouetted against the setting sun, and raises a hand in farewell.

*

“I found her in the gutter,” Miss Fisher tells him. “I mean that almost literally; it was a hideous neighbourhood. She picked my pocket. Made off with the sonic, too - she always had a good eye for the most valuable thing. It turned out there was a whole nest of them, young girls all, presided over by this dreadful impresario fellow.”

“It sounds positively Dickensian.”

“Doesn’t it? Most of the girls had family to be turned up somewhere, but Jane didn’t. I couldn’t let her go back on the street.”

“And that’s why you sent her to school in a dirigible.”

They are standing on the Scottish border beside the TARDIS - now a sleek-looking steam carriage - watching the dirigible drift towards them across the moors.

Miss Fisher peers up at it. “Mademoiselle Geraldine’s is the best finishing school in the country, for my money.”

“And what exactly is it that young ladies learn at finishing school?”

“Why, to finish, of course.” Miss Fisher bats her lashes at him, a practised move she seems not to have felt the need to use in a while. “And I do mean finish _everything_.”

“You don’t strike me as the maternal type.”

“Heavens, no. Can’t abide children. Jane, though - she reminds me of myself, a little, when I was younger.”

“I can’t begin to imagine.”

“I wasn’t always the finished article I am today.” Miss Fisher gestures expansively as if to illustrate the marvel of herself - today clad in a sumptuous maroon gown with a surfeit of ruffles and a splendid bonnet. “This took work, I’ll have you know.” 

The dirigible is descending ponderously to the earth; Jack notes that it is in fact three dirigibles, chained together to form a long ship. Miss Fisher pulls out her diary and makes a note of the time.

“Do you see her often?” Jack inquires. “Her future self, I mean.”

“Enough to know that she’s got a very exciting life ahead of her.” Miss Fisher tucks the diary away and retrieves her parasol from him. “But don’t mention it now - her timeline is quite straightforward until she finishes and flies the coop, and then she’s haring all over the place. I only give her the diary in three years’ time, so I’m told.”

“It sounds like a complicated way to raise a child.”

“Nothing that matters is easy.” Miss Fisher slants a look at him. “You haven’t had any, have you?”

Not for lack of trying. Jack swallows down the memory of Rosie’s stony expression in the doctor’s waiting room, her tears in the aftermath. “We were never blessed.”

Miss Fisher nods and says nothing more, as ladders are lowered from the dirigible and girls begin to descend. One of them detaches quite quickly from the crowd and races through the heather towards them with a shout, flinging her arms around Miss Fisher’s midriff. 

“Goodness, you’ve grown,” says Miss Fisher fondly. “We shall have to get you a new wardrobe.”

“I’m the tallest in my cohort,” says Jane. Her nose is upturned and her straw-coloured hair in pigtails, but there is already a hint of adult sharpening in her face. “Cissy Townsend called me a giraffe, but she’s only jealous because I constantly beat her in duelling class.”

“As you should,” says Miss Fisher. “Jane, I’d like you to meet Detective Inspector Jack Robinson. He’s travelling with us.”

Jane’s eyes narrow as she turns to look him over. “How do you do,” she says coolly.

“Miss Ross,” says Jack. He is a little amused at the suspicion in her gaze. Jane turns back to Miss Fisher with an expression that clearly telegraphs: _Really?_

“Ah,” says Miss Fisher brightly, “here’s Mr Butler with your trunk.” She claps her hands. “Back to London to get started on your holidays! Won’t we have fun?”

*

The first thing they have to do when they get back to London is, unfortunately, break Mac out of jail.

“Oh, don’t fret,” says Miss Fisher, “this happens all the time, it’s practically a ritual. She will keep going down to Covent Garden and handing out contraceptives. We shall be back in a jiffy.”

“Are you sure you don’t need a hand?” says Jack dubiously.

“It’s women’s jail, Jack, you’ll stick out like a sore thumb.” Miss Fisher is somehow contriving to hide a grappling hook under her crinoline; Jack politely averts his eyes. “Just stay in and mind Jane until Dot and Hugh get back from the music hall, will you?”

At first Jack thinks Jane is in her room unpacking, but after he has settled down in the parlour to read, he becomes aware of her hovering on the threshold, gazing balefully at him.

“I can see you, you know,” he says.

“I am practically sixteen,” says Jane imperiously, “and I do not need _minding_.”

“I,” says Jack, “have no intention of minding anything here but my own business.”

Frankly, Jack has no idea what to do with teenage girls. His experience in this field has largely been limited to explaining that their relations or acquaintances have been rendered unexpectedly deceased or, on occasion, arresting them for petty theft, arson or stabbing their boyfriends with hatpins, which happens in his jurisdiction far more often than one might think. As he is not about to arrest Jane, he simply reads a few more pages of his book in silence.

After a while, he glances up to see that Jane has sidled carefully into the room and positioned herself on the farthest chair. “What is it you want with Miss Phryne?”

Jack sighs. “Your guardian and I are just friends.”

“She has a great many gentlemen friends,” says Jane acerbically, “none of whom has lasted very long.”

“I’m sure she does,” says Jack noncommittally.

They pass through another protracted silence, until Jane, unable to contain herself, says: “Is that Dickens you’re reading?”

Jack shows her the cover. “It’s Great Expectations.”

Jane shivers a little. “Miss Phryne says I’m not to read books from the future until I'm older.”

“Yet something tells me you do anyway.”

“It was only the first volume,” says Jane in a rush, “and then I had to go back to school, and they don’t approve of us reading outside of the curriculum there, and the library is rather poor, on account of it being in a dirigible, and there are _hardly_ any novels - ”

Jack holds the book out to her. “You can have it. I won’t tell.”

“Really!” Jane reaches for it, then wavers. “Don’t you want to finish it?”

“I’ve read it before,” says Jack. “I know how it ends.”

“Oh, don’t spoil it!” Jane snatches the book and clutches it to her. “I suppose it must seem rather pat - an orphan liking books about orphans.”

“Plucked from obscure poverty by mysterious, wealthy benefactors,” agrees Jack. “Although I cannot think of anyone less like Miss Havisham than your guardian.”

Jane laughs at that, a quick, bright peal of sound. She claps her hand over her mouth, startled at it. “Thank you,” she says, and scarpers with the book.

Jack tips his head back on the couch thoughtfully. She must have picked that up from her adopted mother: the gift of walking in and walking off with whatever she wants, and him unable to find it in himself to mind.

*

“So you’re doing very well in history and hand-to-hand combat.” Miss Fisher has Jane’s report card in one hand and a forkful of Yorkshire pudding in the other. “Not so good on etiquette and dancing - ”

“ - don’t see what good eyelash fluttering is - ” mutters Jane.

“Eyelash fluttering has got me out of many a tight spot,” Miss Fisher chides her. “Though I see your grades in poison class have improved.”

“All thanks to whose tuition?” Mac demands. Jane tips her head fondly onto Mac's arm and lets the doctor ruffle her hair. She is seated in pride of place at the head of the dining table, framed by Mac and Dot. Miss Fisher sits at the foot with Jack and Collins at either hand. 

Dot and Collins are engaged in the sort of perpetual private conversation newlyweds seem able to keep up in all social settings, occasionally smiling and nodding at the others as if to establish they have not forgotten their existence. Jack is not certain if or when Collins plans to return to his languishing career in the 1960s, or if Dot will follow him. He has not made any inquiries because it cuts a little too close to his own state of limbo.

“More potatoes, Miss Jane?”

“Thank you, Mr Butler. These are topping. The ones they feed us at school are mush.”

“Hang on,” exclaims Miss Fisher, waving the report card indignantly, “by my calculations, you ought to be top of your class! What happened?”

“Oh, that.” Jane pushes a sprout around her plate sheepishly. “I punched Clarissa Stapleton and got demerits.”

“Jane!”

“She’s horrible,” Jane shoots back, “she and Cissy bully the first-years so, just because she’s an earl’s daughter, _and_ I’m certain she sabotaged my bladed fan before mid-terms. I nearly sliced my fingers off.”

“Jane,” says Miss Fisher sternly, “what have we said about punching people?”

Jane huffs. “Not to do it in front of witnesses?”

“Exactly! You should sabotage her back. Cunningly, so nobody'll know who did it except her.” 

Dot breaks off an earnest debate with her husband over the merits of various music hall performers to say: “Oh, and there’s cake!” The announcement is met with applause around the table. Dot blushes and ducks out to fetch it.

“I made you apple cake,” she says, placing a gentle hand on Jane’s shoulder. “I know it’s your favourite.”

Jane doesn’t say anything for a few moments. Her lip trembles a little; you would have to look hard to catch it. “Thank you, Dot,” she says quietly. 

Dot presses a quick kiss to the crown of her head and starts divvying up the cake. Jane gets up to help her hand it out around the table. As she passes Jack and Collins their slices, she says abruptly, as if making a note on a briefing, “My mother used to bake this for me, when I was little.”

Jack takes his plate. “Thank you, Miss Ross.”

“You should call me Jane,” she says, and heads back to her seat.

They eat in silence for a while, before Miss Fisher says: “Have you thought about what you’d like to do on your holidays, Jane? Fancy a trip somewhere exciting? Maybe crash one of those archaeological digs, you always like those.”

“Maybe,” says Jane. She looks up at all of them gathered around her. “But I like this too. It’s nice for now.” 

*

“She used to run away,” says Miss Fisher. “At the beginning, if we took our eyes off her for a minute, she’d be off like a shot.”

“You didn’t stop her?” They are browsing shelves in the Temple of the Muses, an enormous bookshop with a great domed ceiling and a lobby wide enough to drive a carriage through. Jane is trying to simultaneously balance five tomes under her arm and climb a ladder to reach a sixth. 

“Not in the least,” says Miss Fisher. “We would just stay put long enough for her to find us again.”

A bespectacled gentleman with a walrus moustache is regarding the spectacle of Jane in horror. He searches the bookshop wildly for the negligent guardians of this child, catches their eye and makes an outraged gesture as if to appeal to them to rein in their errant charge. Miss Fisher smiles sweetly back at him.

“I think you’re very well-matched,” says Jack.

“A couple of runaways,” agrees Miss Fisher. “One day - and I’m told it will be sooner than later - she’ll run away for good to take on the universe on her own. I suppose I’m sorry to know it will happen, but all I can do till then is prepare her for it.”

“You’ve just summed up parenthood.”

Miss Fisher glances sidelong at him. “You’ve been very matter-of-fact about this.”

“Hm?”

“I can think of a lot of people who would be miffed to find out that I was hiding a secret daughter.”

Jack has the vague feeling that he has been submitted for some kind of test. “I think,” he says carefully, “there is more to you than I will ever have time to find out, and you will simply have to present what you can in the order that I need to know it. Though I suppose the question follows: do you have any more secret children out there in the universe?”

“No,” says Miss Fisher, a smile dancing on the edge of her lips. “Just the one.”

An altercation has started up in the aisle: the irate gentleman has attempted to order Jane off the ladder and Jane has in return dropped a flurry of encyclopaedias on him, trilling “Sorry! Sorry!” and evidently anything but.

“I had better go offer back-up,” says Miss Fisher.

“To smooth things over?”

“To hold her books, in case things get messy.” Miss Fisher swans over, changing her grip on her parasol in the way Jack has seen street toughs shift a length of lead pipe from hand to hand before the first brick is thrown.

“It’s the one thing she can’t stand about time travel.”

Jack turns. There is a woman standing behind him, browsing a copy of Tennyson’s early lyrical verse. She is clad in widow’s weeds, her features obscured by a long black veil. “Pardon?” he says.

“Oh, it’s me.” The woman lifts a corner of her veil to reveal Jane-from-the-future. “Hello. I was in the neighbourhood for a spot of intelligencing, remembered you were here and thought I’d drop in.”

“Where - ” Jack recalibrates. “No, when are you coming from?”

“After the tomb on Astrazan, if that’s what you want to know. I’ve seen you since in my timeline, but it’ll be a while longer for you before you see me next. Anyway, as I was saying, she hates the notion that anything is predestined. She’s never liked to be told what to do with her life, even if it’s by her own future self or someone she loves.”

“In the tomb,” says Jack. “You asked how long I’d been with her, and then you said _early days_.”

“That’s not _too_ much of a spoiler,” says Jane. “It’s clear to anyone that you’ll be around for a while. Even to me - and I was a little ruffian back then, I do apologise.”

“But what am I doing?” says Jack, a little plaintively. “Why am I here?”

“You’ll have to figure that one out in your own time, I’m afraid.” Jane reshelves the Tennyson. “Oh, you’ve got that look.” 

“What look?”

“You know, the one with the furrow ‘twixt your brows.” Jane pulls a face to demonstrate; she is perhaps exaggerating the furrow, but otherwise it is a passable impression. “I forget how confused you were at the beginning. You’re always so stoic about it; it was hard to tell at first.”

“Jane,” he says. “What am I to you?”

Jane tilts her head to one side, considering. “Important,” she says finally. “That, I think, you can know. I hope it helps.”

Across the room, Miss Fisher glances in their direction, then does a double-take, narrowing her eyes. “I should go,” says Jane, fixing her veil. “This meeting isn’t on the books, and I don’t want to cross my own time-stream. I will give you a bit of advice, though.”

“What?”

Jane leans in conspiratorially. “You should teach me to ride a bicycle. I desperately want to learn, and I’ll die before I ask for help. See you when I see you.” She turns on her heel and disappears down the aisle.

“Who was that?” Miss Fisher asks later, after they have all been thrown out of the Temple of the Muses for disturbing the peace - though the clerks did pause mid-eviction to take their money for Jane’s books. 

“Just a stranger,” says Jack. “She wanted to know my thoughts on Tennyson versus Browning.”

“And that’s what happens when we leave you unattended in the poetry section.” Miss Fisher brushes herself off and takes Jane's hand. “Now, what shall we do for the rest of the afternoon?”

“Well,” says Jack, “since you've already scandalised Victorian society once today - how do you feel about bicycles?”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Previously, my rule about the poetry epigraphs was that they all had to be poems Jack would know - ergo, written before 1929. ‘Marina’ breaks that rule - it was published in 1930. It just fits really well though; I couldn't not have it.
> 
> The finishing school Jane attends is Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality from Gail Carriger’s Finishing School quartet, which is set in the 1850s. It is a steampunk airborne spy school where young ladies learn to finish everything - and everyone. Its school motto is Ut acerbus terminus - “To the bitter end”. Jane is, I imagine, a decade above Sophronia Temminick, the heroine of the quartet.
> 
> In Great Expectations (my favourite Dickens novel), two orphans are adopted by wealthy eccentrics who raise them to further a particular agenda. Miss Havisham, having been jilted at the altar in her youth, raises her daughter Estella to break men’s hearts, thereby turning her into a kind of sociopath (though quite a self-aware one). I always did think Estella got quite a raw deal in the novel; Dickens clearly doesn’t really know how to write women with interiority.
> 
> The Temple of the Muses in Finsbury Square was perhaps the world’s first super-bookstore; its founder, James Lackington, is thought to have pioneered several of the strategies that characterise mainstream bookselling today, such as buying up remaindered lots of books and selling them at bargain prices. The store was huge and you could indeed drive a mail coach through it - in fact Lackington did this at the opening - but it burned down in 1841 and was never rebuilt.
> 
> In my head, adult Jane looks like Erin Doherty from The Crown, but her vibe in disguise is similar to Millie Bobby Brown’s in Enola Holmes, when she flings back her veil and leans in to break the fourth wall by whispering: “‘Tis I!” Her unusual timeline, as well as her future career, is of course inspired by the inimitable River Song.


	6. a sweet disorder in the dress

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a string of jewel thefts in the Ton forces Mrs Prudence Stanley to call upon her scandalous niece to save the London Season, and Jack Robinson, a respectable officer of the law, comes up against Jack Harkness, the greatest rake ever lived.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _A sweet disorder in the dress  
>  Kindles in clothes a wantonness_  
> \- Robert Herrick, ‘Delight In Disorder’
> 
> This chapter is dedicated to my dear friend C, with whom I had this conversation at the beginning of the year:
> 
> C: Regency romances are my 2021 genre of choice  
> Me: I wish there were more MFMM Regency AUs  
> C: pls write a Regency AU for MFMM  
> C: omg PLS  
> Me: …
> 
> Anyway that is how I ended up writing a Regency AU within a time travel AU, that escalated quickly, but so does almost everything in fandom. Everything I know about the Regency I learnt from watching far too much Bridgerton and random phrases C texts me from Georgette Heyer novels, such as “Do you take me for a chucklehead, sir!” I apologise in advance to any actual Regency fans.
> 
> Content warning: this chapter contains minor mentions of unplanned pregnancy and abortion.

“Perhaps Venice,” Miss Fisher is saying. “Or Kyoto - I could land us in the middle of cherry blossom season. Or - ” 

An alarm goes off. It sounds unceremoniously like a squawking chicken. Miss Fisher looks over at the TARDIS main display, across which is scrolling _You have one new message_ , and blanches.

“What is it?” says Dot apprehensively. “Is it Cybermen, miss?”

“Worse.” Miss Fisher’s voice is full of foreboding. “We’ve been summoned.”

*

“Phryne!” says the Matron. “You look a fright. Whyever are you wearing trousers?”

“Yes, hello to you too, Aunt Prudence,” mutters Miss Fisher. “I was given to understand it was an emergency; are trousers not called for?”

The TARDIS has materialised in the attic of what Jack understands to be the vast domicile of Phryne’s Aunt Prudence when she is in town. He glances out of the window, which overlooks a very pleasant square lined with trees heavy with white blossom. Gentlemen in top hats and frock coats are strolling beneath them, arm-in-arm with ladies bearing parasols and feathers in their hair. A fashionable address, then.

Mrs Stanley draws herself up imperiously. “As you know, I am hosting my ball this weekend - ”

“Oh, rot,” says Miss Fisher, “we’re not attending _that_.”

“ - and though we are barely a fortnight into the Season,” Mrs Stanley rolls on unheeding, “there has already been _crime_.”

“Oh!” Miss Fisher brightens. “Why didn’t you say so earlier? We would be delighted to help you with _crime_ , Aunt Prudence. What sort?”

“Theft,” declares Mrs Stanley. “Five debutantes have had jewels stolen from around their necks, and none can say how!”

“I’m sure they must have _some_ idea,” says Miss Fisher dryly.

“Not the faintest. At first we thought they must simply be missing, but the Society Tatler, that dreadful scandal sheet, is putting it about that there is a thief in the Ton and the debutantes simply won’t confess to having been compromised. I do hope you can resolve it before the week is out, Phryne; I should hate to have my ball blighted by scandal.”

“Excuse me,” says Jack, “but has anybody called the police?”

“And have the Bow Street Runners underfoot at every tea dance and soirée, asking rough questions of our society misses?” Mrs Stanley shudders. “And who are _you,_ might I ask?”

“The police,” says Jack fatalistically.

“A thief-taker, Phryne,” says Mrs Stanley in tones of despair, “how dreadfully outré; must you _really?”_

"Oh, for heaven's sakes," snaps Miss Fisher. "Do you want this case solved or not?"

*

“Here’s the plan,” says Miss Fisher, back in the safety of the TARDIS. “You - ” she points at Jane “ - are Miss Jane Fairfax, an orphaned heiress making your debut on the marriage mart. You - ” she points at Jack “ - are her guardian, Captain Worthing, lately returned from your Australian posting to squire your ward through the London season as a favour to her late uncle, a distant cousin to Aunt Prudence and your dear comrade who gave you your step. Dot, you will work the ground as Miss Fairfax’s companion, Mrs Cardew, a former governess.”

“Are you just pulling names out of Oscar Wilde plays?” Jack says.

“Ugh, the Ton.” Jane is honing the edges of her bladed fan with a whetstone. “I can’t abide their games; do we have to play?”

“Don’t think of it as a game, think of it as a mission. You’re infiltrating a closed society of rigid rules to obtain intelligence. It’ll be good for your subterfuge finals next year.”

“Not that I mind,” says Jack, “but why am I posing as Jane’s guardian and not you?”

“I’m very bad Ton,” says Miss Fisher with relish. “They all know me as Aunt Prudence’s disreputable niece. If Jane has so much as a whiff of scandal about her, they’ll cut her the moment she steps in the door. You, on the other hand, exude respectability. I think it’s your bone structure.”

“And what will you be doing all this while?”

“Parading about with my Colombian emeralds.” 

“Ah,” says Jack. “Bait.”

“We are all of us bait of some variety,” corrects Miss Fisher. “Well, not Mac.”

“I’m having none of this rigmarole,” says Mac from the armchair. “I’m going to sapphic book club.”

“We’ve only been here a few hours and you’ve already hunted down sapphic book club,” says Miss Fisher. “I’m impressed.”

Mac shrugs. “I have my ways.”

“Of course you do,” says Miss Fisher. “Tighter, I think, Dot.” 

Dot tugs obligingly on the laces of Miss Fisher’s corset. “What is the ideal tightness?” Jane wants to know.

“It’s a fine balance,” says Miss Fisher. “You want to give yourself breathing room, but you don’t want it to be so loose that you’re shedding daggers in the middle of a quadrille. Yes, Dot, I think that’ll do.” She proceeds to shove what seems like a small arsenal of weaponry down her bodice. Jack stares in polite alarm at the mantle from his corner, which is the farthest he can get from the situation without actually leaving the room. Collins has wisely made himself scarce. 

Miss Fisher knocks her knuckles experimentally against her corset. “Stress test! Throw something at me.”

Jane palms a small knife and hurls it at her. It rebounds off the corset and lands quivering in the doorjamb next to Mrs Stanley’s horrified face.

“ _Phryne!”_ thunders that redoubtable lady.

“Really, Aunt P,” Miss Fisher puts her hands on her hips, “you ought to knock.”

Mrs Stanley simmers in high dudgeon. “If you’re quite done with that nonsense, I’ve brought you your miniatures.” She arranges a slew of small pictures across the coffee table. “This one’s a viscount. Fifteen thousand pounds a year, I’m told.”

“We’re trying to build up a suspect list, not marry Jane off.” Miss Fisher flicks disparagingly through the miniatures.

Mrs Stanley scrutinises Jane, who lifts her chin. “This is the girl you want me to sponsor?”

“Jane is doing very well at finishing school,” says Miss Fisher. “Top of her class. Well, practically top. She can hold her own in a cotillion or a fan duel, is practised at court etiquette and can hit a target dead centre at twenty yards.”

“Well, she is hardly a diamond of the first water,” says Mrs Stanley critically, “but needs must, I suppose. My name should secure you invitations to the Templeton ball; try not to bring shame down on this house, girl.”

“I shall take my cues from my betters, ma’am,” says Jane, with a sidelong glance at Miss Fisher, who winks back.

*

“The Right Honourable Miss Phryne Fisher,” announces the majordomo at the Templetons’ ball.

Talk stills across the room; heads turn to look as Miss Fisher descends the staircase. One cannot help but look; the green of her gown is deep as a lake, and the emeralds nestle dangerously low in the scoop of her bodice. The gown would be parlous enough in the twentieth century; in the nineteenth it is positively lethal. Jack is, by this point, accustomed to the way she seems to unsettle every current in the room and redirect it towards her, from the movement of air to the flow of blood. It is a little gratifying to see an entire roomful of people similarly affected.

Miss Fisher has said she is bad Ton, but there is already a crowd of keen gentlemen flocking to her. Jack moves around the edge of the hall, where he has been installed all evening with the buffet table in reach, and watches the people watch her.

“The nerve of that lightskirt,” says one lady with enough feathers in her hair to stuff a cushion. “She must know she is not quite the thing.”

“She cannot still be hanging out for a husband, can she?” exclaims another, fanning herself furiously. “One sees the rakes already circling.”

“Perhaps she will take up with that American. Have you seen him?”

“I heard him conversing at Vauxhall. Such a vulgar accent! Though I must say he is well in looks. Flush in the pockets too, I hear.”

“Just the sort she would hang on the sleeve of. I hear she spends the rest of the year gallivanting about the Colonies with all comers. Poor Mrs Stanley has quite given up on her.”

“Is not Mrs Stanley sponsoring some late debutante from the country?”

“That one there; dancing with the second Montgomery boy.”

Jack glances over at the dance floor, where Jane is essaying the minuet with a dark-haired, earnest-looking young man. Something he says makes Jane laugh; she might not even be faking it, at that.

“She has set her cap at the wrong Montgomery; should you think she knows he was only old Lord Simon’s by-blow?”

“You ought to be pleased at that, Mrs Sefton; after all, your Isabel is dangling after the new Lord Montgomery himself, is she not?”

“My Isabel is flush with options, Lady Casterbrook; Lord Montgomery is but one of her many swains. Trust she is not threatened by some country mushroom barely out of leading strings - and plain to boot.”

“No need to bristle, Mrs Sefton. I merely made an observation.”

Jane is circling back to him, her cheeks flushed from the minuet. “Who was that you were dancing with?” asks Jack, handing her a glass of punch.

“Why, are you going to fetch the shotgun?” says Jane good-humouredly. “Adam Montgomery, Lord Montgomery’s brother.”

“Half-brother,” says Jack. “He’s illegitimate.”

“Hm.” Jane fans herself thoughtfully. “Explains a lot. Chip on the shoulder. Their sister is Miss Clementine Montgomery over there - ” she nods towards a golden-haired young woman, very fragile and beautiful in cream and rose, dancing with a much older gentleman. He looks covetous and quite in his cups; she looks bored. “They’re calling her the Incomparable of the Season. And, as it so happens, she’s one of the debutantes who had her pearls filched. I think if we can get a list of suitors for each of the victims and cross-reference them, they’ll have the thief in common.” She down her glass. “Well, I had better get back in the fray. We can’t all get our information by standing dourly in the corner eavesdropping.”

Miss Fisher finally lets him know she seeks conclave by swanning over to him and pointedly dropping her fan. There is a sibilant intake of breath from the watchers. Jack bends down and picks up the fan.

“Much obliged, sir,” says Miss Fisher. The way the emeralds clasp her throat is really quite transfixing. “Aren’t you going to ask if my dance card is full?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know most of the dances,” says Jack, “except the waltz.”

“The waltz!” Miss Fisher taps him lightly with her fan. “How terribly forward of you.”

“I’m a man ahead of the times,” says Jack.

“May I cut in?” says a voice.

“No, you may not - ” begins Jack irately.

“I really must insist.” The man is tall, broad-shouldered and, from his accent, American. 

“Jack!” breathes Miss Fisher in delight. And Jack realises, to his dismay, that she is not addressing him.

“Fish,” says the other Jack, “so glad you showed up, I need to get the hell out of here.” He turns to Jack, looks him over, flashes him a grin well-polished from use and sticks out his hand. “Well, hello there. I’m Captain Jack Harkness.”

*

“I have never in all my long life been so threatened by matrimony,” says Jack Harkness. “People are flinging their daughters at me left, right and centre. The daughters are flinging themselves. The sexual frustration’s so thick you could cut it like butter and spread it on toast.”

They are on the terrace, Miss Fisher having made some loud declarations about the heat, and now hopefully out of range of prying ears. Jack checks the shrubbery again just to be sure. 

“Can’t you just leave?” says Miss Fisher.

“Can’t. My vortex manipulator’s been stolen. It was at one of these parties, so it must have been someone in this crowd.”

“I thought the Doctor deactivated your manipulator,” says Miss Fisher with mock-severity.

“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” says Harkness. “It’ll be our little secret.” 

They share a loaded look. They have definitely slept together, Jack infers. He is more annoyed by this than he ought to be. 

“Perhaps our jewel thief took your manipulator,” he puts in.

“They must have known what to look for,” says Harkness. He mirrors Jack’s lean on the balustrade. “Jack - may I also call you Jack?”

“I would really rather you did not,” says Jack. “It is very confusing.”

“Well, you may call me Jack any time.”

“Thank you, Captain Harkness.”

“Is he always this buttoned-up?” Harkness remarks to Miss Fisher. “Or is it just the century?”

“He’s from the 1920s,” says Miss Fisher, “but yes.”

Harkness leans back and regards Jack. There is a gleam in his eye. Jack is not sure how to parse it. “Do you know what I’m thinking?”

“Mm,” says Miss Fisher suggestively. “I believe I do.”

The two of them continue to gaze at him with a speculation bordering on predatory. Jack clears his throat. “The case, Miss Fisher?”

Miss Fisher gives herself a little shake. “Oh, yes. I have advertised myself and my jewels, and now I need but wait around dark corners for one of these gentlemen to try and importune me.”

Jack opens his mouth to protest the plan, but there is a scream from inside the house, which is how they learn that their esteemed hostess Lady Agatha Templeton has been found dead in the library.

“I’ll take the crime scene,” says Jack.

“I’ll do the study,” says Miss Fisher.

“Need a distraction?” Harkness offers.

“Oh no, we have that covered.” Miss Fisher gives the slightest of nods at Jane, who proceeds to execute a truly spectacular swoon into the arms of the nearest swain - Lord Montgomery, as it happens - distracting those assembled long enough for them to slip out. 

“She’s doing so well,” says Miss Fisher proudly, pulling her sonic out of her bodice.

*

“It’s too dreadful,” laments Mrs Stanley. “This Season is headed for disaster. I doubt my nerves can bear any more.”

“Oh come off it, Aunt P,” Miss Fisher shoots back. “You weren’t even there. So: we have established cause of death?”

“Dr MacMillan is still sleeping off her hangover,” says Jack, “but in the absence of her learned opinion, I feel it safe to presume it was the bloodied statuette found by the body, applied with great force to the back of the head.”

“Spur of the moment,” says Miss Fisher. “Likely unpremeditated.” She fishes what seems like Lady Templeton’s entire correspondence out of her bodice and fans it out on the table in Aunt Prudence’s morning room. Her bodice truly has TARDIS-like qualities, Jack thinks, and then he has to stop thinking about Miss Fisher’s bodice because that way lies madness.

Dot comes over from where she and Collins are comparing lists of suitors for each of the jewellery theft victims, which Jane is impressively reproducing from memory. “These figures look like payments,” she says, running her finger down a page torn from a ledger. “Waddingham, Hunsdon, Skeffington - oh, I think I know this.” She bustles out of the room just as a footman enters and says: “A gentleman caller, madam.”

“For Jane?” exclaims Mrs Stanley. “Well, that is something, at least.” 

“A Captain Jack Harkness,” continues the footman.

“Oh,” says Mrs Stanley, in the tones of someone who has discovered a slug in their shoe. “I suppose it cannot be helped. Send him up.”

“Matron,” cries Harkness effusively upon being shown in. “Fish has spoken of you often, but words have failed to do your presence justice.”

“I imagine there is very little justice involved where you are concerned, Captain,” returns Aunt Prudence frostily. “Your reputation precedes you.”

Dot hurries back in with her arms full of papers, startles at the sight of Harkness and drops them. “Oh!” she says. “Beg pardon, I didn’t know we had callers.”

Harkness bends to help her pick them up. “Captain Jack Harkness, at your service.”

Dot laughs a little breathlessly. “Dorothy Williams. All my friends call me Dot.”

“I hope you shall count me among their number,” says Harkness, taking her hand and kissing it, “ _Dot_.”

“I think you mean _Mrs Dorothy Collins_ , sweetheart,” says Collins loudly, striding across the room and looking in a mild apoplexy. He interposes himself between his wife and Harkness. “Hugh Collins. Her husband.”

“Pleasure,” says Harkness. He glances over with amusement in Miss Fisher and Jack’s direction, as if sharing with them an inside joke. Miss Fisher raises an eyebrow. Jack stares bleakly at Mrs Stanley’s chandelier.

“Anyway, here’s what I wanted to show you, miss.” Dot lays out the papers she carried in - they are all copies of the scandal sheet The Society Tatler. “April 14 - Mr Henry Waddingham is found to have not one, but two natural children with a Drury Lane actress, and all this while angling to wed the Right Honourable Miss Sylvia Pethering.” She picks up the ledger. “There are payments from Waddingham up till April 10. And here, look: May 25 - the Marchioness of Hunsdon is revealed to be dallying with her footman. Payments from Hunsdon up till May 21.”

“Lady Templeton was the Society Tatler,” breathes Miss Fisher. “And a blackmailer too!”

“Good heavens,” cries Mrs Stanley. “And her a patroness of Almack’s! I can hardly countenance it.”

“Well, we have narrowed down the identity of her killer,” says Jack in exasperation. “To just about everybody she was blackmailing.”

“Perhaps she had dirt on our jewel thief,” muses Miss Fisher, “and they uncovered her identity and silenced her before she could go to print. Any headway on that suitor cross-referencing, Jane?”

“It’s a wide pool,” says Jane. “Captain Harkness, for one, is on all the lists.”

“That sounds about right,” says Harkness cheerfully.

“For all that you were born in the 51st century,” says Miss Fisher, “you are veritably the dictionary definition of ‘rake’.”

Harkness sketches a bow.

“Nothing for it,” decides Miss Fisher. “We shall have to attend another ball.”

*

Jack, as a rule, dislikes parties. The Regency has thus turned into a sort of recurring nightmare for him. He has become the person who lurks behind flower arrangements nursing glasses of (admittedly rather good) claret.

He takes a sip and observes the couple having a less than private altercation behind a pillar. On closer inspection, they are the elder Montgomery siblings; Ambrose Montgomery seems to be lecturing his sister about a subject that requires a lot of hissed imprecations and hand-waving, while she is having none of it. 

Jack observes that he is not alone; Adam Montgomery is watching his half-siblings from across the room, eyes narrowed. Clementine scoops up her gown and stalks off into the gardens. Ambrose throws up his hands in exasperation. Adam turns and moves smoothly through the crush towards where Jane has taken a break from the dancing. 

“Jane has a suitor, I believe,” Jack says to Miss Fisher, who has extricated herself from the crush and is passing through the foyer. “Where are you off to?”

“I’m sure she could use the practice,” says Miss Fisher. “I’m for the gardens - I have been here all night and nobody has tried to compromise me, not even once.”

“A crying shame,” agrees Jack. “Do you need me in the gardens?”

“I don’t,” says Miss Fisher, but her mouth softens. “But I should like you at hand. Though not too close, lest we discourage anything untoward from happening.”

Unfortunately this plan falls through - they are barely halfway through the maze when they stumble across Jack Harkness and Clementine Montgomery in a torrid embrace.

“But we must marry!” exclaims Clementine, breaking away for breath. “If your affections for me are true, then we should wed post-haste.”

“Look, Clementine,” says Harkness, “you’re a lovely girl, to be sure, but I am not going to marry you because we made out in a hedge.”

Clementine bursts into tears. “If you do not offer for me, my brother plans to wed me to Sir Henry Skeffington.”

“Oh,” says Harkness. “Is that so terrible? I heard he’s fabulously wealthy.”

“He is a cad and a bounder, and forever foxed,” sobs Clementine. “I shall have a miserable time of it with him; you are my only hope.”

“Unhand my sister, you scoundrel!” And here comes Ambrose Montgomery, storming furiously through the maze. Harkness puts up his hands in a placating gesture, but Ambrose simply punches him in the face. Clementine claps her hands over her mouth to muffle her scream.

From there on in, it is a debacle. Jack finds himself holding Harkness back; Adam Montgomery is restraining his brother. “You will come up to scratch, sir,” says Ambrose around a split lip. “Or I must demand satisfaction.”

“I am really not going to marry your sister, Montgomery,” says Harkness wearily. “That would be an extremely bad idea for us both.”

“Do you take me for a chucklehead, sir?” snarls Ambrose. “Name your seconds; my brother and I shall see you at dawn. Come, sister - we must return before your absence is noted.” 

As they storm off, Harkness runs a hand through his dishevelled hair and turns to Jack. “Do you mind being my second? I’d ask Fish, on account of what a great shot she is, but I’m guessing it’s not the done thing to ask a lady round here.”

Jack glares at him. “I’m your second second?” 

“Don’t be like that,” says Harkness.

*

“This is the height of stupidity,” says Jack.

“I know,” says Harkness through gritted teeth, watching Ambrose Montgomery confer with the doctor across the field. “The sooner we solve this case, the sooner we can get out of this century.”

Ambrose watches, pale as a sheet, as Adam presents Jack with a pair of pistols for his inspection. Jack loads one and hands it to Harkness, who steps back-to-back with Ambrose. “Ready!” shouts Ambrose. His voice trembles. 

“Ready,” says Harkness grimly.

They walk ten paces, and then Ambrose spins and fires. The bullet hits Harkness in the chest. 

“Ow,” says Harkness. He sounds almost matter-of-fact about it. Then, without missing a beat, he sights and shoots the pistol out of Ambrose’s hand.

Ambrose staggers. Adam makes to rush forward, but Harkness is already there, bracing him as he sags. “Hey, hey, look, you did the thing, okay? You did good, kid.”

“How - ” tries Ambrose faintly, gesturing at Harkness’s bullet wound.

Harkness winces. “Not important.” He waves away the hovering doctor. “The point is, you’ve restored your sister’s honour, we’re good, let’s all walk it off.”

“You cannot understand,” says Ambrose, “Clementine, she - by God, it is too much. If only Father had not left us so suddenly; I do not know how I am to see it through.”

“Your sister is a very nice girl,” says Harkness. “She’ll have her pick of men this Season and whoever she chooses will be lucky to have her. It doesn’t have to be me, or this Skeffington fellow.”

“You cannot - ” Ambrose repeats, and then he gives up and simply stares stricken at Harkness.

Jack has been nursing a niggling suspicion all night. The way in which Clementine had thrown herself at Harkness; her brother’s immense distress; the haste at which he seems to have arranged these nuptials with Skeffington, who from what Jack has observed seems hardly a catch, funds aside. And where has he heard the name Skeffington before?

“Lord Montgomery,” he says, “is your sister with child?”

Ambrose buries his face in his hands.

“Oh,” says Harkness. “ _Oh_.”

“It is not so sordid as all that,” puts in Adam, attempting to salvage the situation, “they were childhood sweethearts, only he went off to fight on the Continent and never came back. And then Father died, and our sister began increasing. You see how imperative it is that she make a match within the month.”

“I am doing a rotten job,” says Ambrose into his fingers.

“Don’t say that, kid,” says Harkness. “Everything’s going to be just fine.”

“You will marry her?”

Harkness blanches. “Still a hard no. But it’s all going to work out. I think.”

Ambrose is staring at him with that particular blend of confusion mixed with adulation that Harkness seems to produce in total strangers. Jack feels a migraine coming on.

“Pardon, sir.” It’s Adam, politely clearing his throat. “While we are both present, there is another matter I should like to broach.”

“Yes?” says Jack irritably.

“It has to do with your ward, Miss Fairfax. I should like to ask for her hand in marriage.”

“What?” says Jack. “Marry Jane? No. No! What is wrong with you people?”

Adam draws himself up. “If your objections are to my birth,” he begins stiffly.

“No, it’s not that,” says Jack, “only - good God, have you asked Jane?”

“No,” says Adam, non-plussed. “I thought it proper to seek your accord first, sir.”

“Good God,” says Jack again.

“I will allow that my prospects are not stellar, but my brother shall purchase for me a commission, that I may distinguish myself in service - ”

“Please,” says Jack, “just stop. You will not marry Jane. Nobody will marry anybody.”

“But surely that is the whole point,” says Adam, wounded.

Yes, thinks Jack in despair. They really need to get out of this century.

*

“Skeffington, Skeffington - ” Dot is leafing through Lady Templeton’s papers. “Ah! Skeffington! Here he is. Payments every week until last - he missed the third of the month.”

“Lady Templeton was killed on the fourth,” says Miss Fisher. “Perhaps she knew something that would thwart Skeffington’s chance at a match. Did you see him at the ball, Jane?”

“A boor,” says Jane. “Terrible dancer, too. Soused, I think he was. Adam doesn’t like him for Clementine, but it’s not up to him.”

Jack throws Miss Fisher a sidelong glance. Miss Fisher says lightly: “Talk a lot with Adam, do we?”

Jane shrugs. “He’s the least terrible man I’ve had to dance with this decade, but the bar is not high.”

From downstairs comes the sound of Mrs Stanley barking in stentorian tones at the florists.

“We shall lay a trap,” declares Miss Fisher. “At Aunt Prudence’s ball tonight, it’ll be perfect.”

“I don’t think Mrs Stanley would like that very much,” says Dot carefully.

“Nonsense,” says Miss Fisher. “We’ll be ever so discreet. She’ll never know.”

*

“ _Phryne!”_ bellows Mrs Stanley.

“I will admit,” says Miss Fisher, as Henry Skeffington, waving a carving knife he pulled from the supper table, casts about wildly for an escape route out of the ballroom amid great hue and cry, “it has escalated somewhat.”

The latest edition of the Tatler - in fact Dot’s fairly convincing pastiche of Lady Templeton’s style - distributed subtly around the room while the ball was in full swing, announced Skeffington’s much-vaunted fortune as having succumbed to a mountain of gambling debt. “Guard your daughters and their dowries,” it warned, “for certainly Sir Skeffington shall never make a match on personality alone. Lady Templeton should know.”

Skeffington eyes the available exits, at which Harkness, Collins and Jack have stationed themselves. Then, as Jane drifts into reach, he seizes her by the arm and presses the knife to her neck. “Let me through,” he snarls, “or I’ll - I’ll - ”

“Or you’ll what?” Miss Fisher’s voice carries across the ballroom. She looks very calm for someone whose ward is being held hostage. “Murder another defenceless woman?”

“She was hardly defenceless, that old cow.” Skeffington seems to decide he will chance Collins and begins dragging Jane in that direction. Jane is doing her level best to play the frail damsel, though she seems a trifle bored with proceedings. 

“Unhand her!” Adam has darted to the front of the crowd, his voice unsteady. “Skeffington, please, let her go.”

The sight of him seems to infuriate Skeffington further. “You,” he hisses, “I should have known better than to trust the word of a bastard,” and then he lunges at Adam with the knife. 

Jack starts forward, but Jane has already swung into action: her hand comes up, the blades of her fan snapping open, and Skeffington screams, the knife tumbling from his useless, bloodied hand. In one swift movement, Jane flips him - though he is twice her size - and pins him with a knee to the throat, fan handle poised above his eye. “Don’t try it,” she warns.

The ballroom erupts into chaos. Several ladies faint in an utterly unschooled manner. Adam is staring at Jane open-mouthed, stunned and possibly worshipful. “Ah yes,” Collins is saying awkwardly in the background, “perhaps we ought to take it from here, Jane. Henry Skeffington, you’re under arrest for murder, you have the right to remain silent - hang on, do I need to say that in this period - ”

“Okay,” says Harkness, “do we hand him over to the actual police, or - ”

“You’ll hand him over to me.” Mrs Stanley draws herself up in cold fury. “I shall take care of it.”

Harkness shivers. “Yes ma’am.”

*

“I cannot believe you almost promised me to that horrible man,” Clementine says hotly.

Ambrose has his head in his hands. “I am _trying_ , Clem. Deuce knows I’m making a mull of it, but I am trying. We’re in the devil’s own scrape, and I cannot see a way out of it.”

Mac clears her throat from the door of Mrs Stanley’s parlour. “So there’s a troubled young woman I’m supposed to have a word with?”

The Montgomery siblings stare at her, in her smoking jacket and trousers. Mac sighs. “That’ll be you, I reckon,” she says to Clementine, who bites her lip. “No prizes for guessing. This way.”

“If my sister’s problem may be so resolved,” says Ambrose, as Clementine follows Mac out, “how can we thank you enough?”

“Well, there is one thing,” says Miss Fisher. “Your brother could return the jewels he stole. Couldn’t you, Adam?”

All eyes turn to Adam, who is standing in the corner. “I don’t know what you mean,” he says, paling. “Surely Skeffington - ”

“Skeffington is a murderer,” says Miss Fisher, “but he is not a thief. Dot, where are my emeralds?”

“In the dressing room upstairs, miss.”

“I don’t think so,” says Miss Fisher. “I think you’ll find them in our young Mr Montgomery’s pocket.”

Adam reaches suddenly into his coat. Jack comes alert, lest he pull out a gun - but he seems unable to find what he is looking for, patting himself down frantically.

“Looking for this?” Jane pulls a vortex manipulator out of the hidden pocket Dot sewed into her skirt. “Here,” she tosses it to Harkness, “think this is yours.”

“You’re like me,” says Adam incredulously to Jane. “You’re a thief.”

“And a bloody sight better at it too.” Jane’s voice has slipped from her rarefied finishing school accent to something rougher. “I’ve done my time in the streets. That’s where your old man found you, ain’t it? Plucked you from the grime to become a gentleman, only the gathered lights of society will never look at you the same way, ‘cos they know where you come from.”

“I was only trying to help,” says Adam, pleading. “I thought if I could get enough funds, I could help Clem get away, and she wouldn’t have had to marry someone like Skeffington.”

“But our mother’s pearls,” begins Ambrose, distraught.

“Clem let me take them, to keep up the deception. It was so easy - they just wear the jewels out everywhere, and if you can get a young lady alone she’ll never tell, for fear of the scandal. Then I saw him - ” he jerks his head at Harkness “ - using that device to get around, and I thought I could use that to run away.”

“You used it to steal more jewels,” says Miss Fisher, her voice hard as gemstones. “You tried to rob Lady Templeton, didn’t you? That’s how you found out she was the Tatler. But she found out about you too. And then all you needed was a few words in Skeffington’s ear, to push him in the right direction to hush her up, and voilà, you’ve killed two birds with one stone.”

“I was only trying to help,” repeats Adam. “I didn’t - I didn’t _kill_ anyone.”

“But you told someone’s secret to someone else because you knew he would want to hurt her,” says Jane. She has drawn her posh accent back around her vowels like armour. “So no, Adam - I don’t think we are like each other at all.”

“I do care for you, Jane,” says Adam in a small voice. “That wasn’t a lie.”

“Oh,” says Jane. She twists at a ribbon on her dress. “Well. That’s nice. Good luck with that.”

Jack says, pointedly: “If we could have the emeralds back now, please.”

*

“All told,” says Miss Fisher, “I think that was a rather good party.” She and Jack are sitting on the steps of the ballroom, splitting a leftover bottle of champagne and surveying the wreckage of the evening’s festivities.

“I doubt your aunt would agree.”

“Oh, she’s pleased to have resolved the matter, really. Society will dine out on the excitement of this for the rest of the Season.”

“Pity about Adam and Jane.”

Miss Fisher scoffs. “They’re young, they’ll get over it. My first love wasn’t half this forgiving.”

Jack waits, but she doesn’t say anything further. “Story for another time?”

“Mm.” Miss Fisher catches sight of Jack Harkness picking his way across the ballroom towards them. “Are you off, then?”

“Getting the hell out of dodge,” replies Harkness. “I’m hoping to avoid your aunt on the way out, but I know you’d never forgive me if I didn’t say goodbye.”

Miss Fisher rises to meet him. “Where are you headed?”

Harkness shrugs. “Haven’t seen the Doctor in a while. Think I might go looking for him again, see if he’s up for a whirl.”

Miss Fisher rolls her eyes. “Good luck with _that_.” Then she kisses Harkness on the mouth, a lazy, slow sort of kiss redolent with familiarity. Jack registers a faint flicker of irritation, but not much else. They are so alike, Miss Fisher and Captain Harkness - these near-immortal beings with their wide tastes and vast hearts. He can only ever know a sliver of what they know.

Harkness comes to stand over him. “Inspector Robinson.”

“Captain Harkness,” says Jack equably.

“It’s been a pleasure,” says Harkness. “Could’ve been more of, but - ah well. Let me know if you change your mind.”

“About what?” says Jack.

Harkness laughs. Then he bows in a terribly gallant fashion and lifts Jack’s hand to his lips.

“Don’t be a stranger,” he says, turning to descend the steps. He vanishes before he reaches the bottom.

“That was confusing,” says Jack.

“It happens,” says Miss Fisher. “And now, Inspector, I believe you owe me a waltz.”

“The waltz is a terribly dangerous dance, Miss Fisher. And under your aunt’s roof, no less. I don’t believe we are approved for it.”

“Hang their approval.” She stretches out her hand to him. “I thrive in disgrace.”

The orchestra has gone home; she sings under her breath - Shostakovich, it sounds like - but lets him lead. She contains such multitudes that it seems impossible his arms can hold it all; it is like trying to waltz a universe. She might be the most terrifying person he has ever met. It takes so much of his energy to keep up his defences around her; yet, in moments as perilous as these, when the danger of her is so close, it seems worth it. 

She spins to the farthest reach of his fingertips, then curls back into the crook of his arm. Her smile is a brilliant thing.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A lot of the plot in this episode is loosely cribbed from Bridgerton, though the characters are all OCs.
> 
> What was Jack Harkness doing in Regency England to begin with? Where exactly in his timeline are we? How did Aunt Prudence escape the Last Great Time War? All questions I am afraid I have not the capacity to answer. Such are the mysteries of time travellers.


	7. to run its riders down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Bert and Cec, cabdrivers of the post-apocalypse, pick up a passenger with trouble on her heels; a town of women needs help; and a former companion of Miss Fisher’s returns with a vengeance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _It flees across the country and it flees back to the town  
>  And straight for Caesar's Column to run its riders down._  
> \- Henry Lawson, ‘The Motor Car’
> 
> Me: What is something that combines Australia, Communists, cars and the future?  
> The Internet: [Here you go](https://existentialcomics.com/comic/186)
> 
> This chapter, the working title of which was Mad Marx: Fury Road, takes inspiration from the films of George Miller, as well as the neo-Western TV shows Godless and Firefly, particularly the episodes Serenity and Heart Of Gold. It is therefore grimmer than previous episodes - content warning for mentions of human trafficking and a past abusive relationship.

“It always feels so quiet after Jane goes back to school,” laments Miss Fisher, sprawled on the chaise longue with an arm flung over her eyes.

“I highly doubt it’ll stay quiet for long,” says Mac with foreboding. 

Indeed, the quiet lasts all of half an hour before a light on the dashboard starts flickering. “Incoming call, miss,” says Dot. “From New Victoria, 2121.”

“Oh! It must be Bert and Cec.” Miss Fisher springs to her feet. “It’s been ages. I wonder how they are.”

Not well, as it turns out. “So we are in a bit of a pickle, miss,” says the taller of the two, who Jack has gathered is Cec, on the dashboard screen. They seem to be in a wildly jostling vehicle. Jack is fairly sure that is gunfire he hears in the background.

“Did you call Miss Fisher?” Bert is the one driving. “I told you not to call her! Begging your pardon, miss,” he adds into the screen, “don’t mean to trouble you, we can handle this one on our own.”

“No, we can’t, Bert!” The gunfire sounds again, closer, accompanied by a nasty whirring noise. “Bloody hell,” says Cec, “they’ll spike our wheels. I’d better get in the turret.” He climbs out of view. The retort of returning fire sounds over the speakers.

“What is it they do again?” Jack says in an undertone to Mac.

“They’re cabdrivers.”

“Do all cabs in 2121 have machine guns?”

Mac shrugs. “Seems handy.”

“I’ve locked onto your timestream.” Miss Fisher’s hands are flying over the controls. “Brace yourselves, everyone - we’re coming in hot.”

“Cec and his bloody strays,” growls Bert. “Picked up this half-dead sheila by the side of the road. Next thing we know, we’ve got a buzzard on our tail.”

Just about visible onscreen is the woman curled in their backseat. “Can you give me the rear view?” asks Miss Fisher.

Bert flicks something and the screen switches; now they can see out the back of the cab, with what’s chasing it in full view.

“Collins,” says Jack, “get the flamethrower.”

*

“Ready?” Miss Fisher yells down the corridor.

Jack slams open the sunroof. He and Collins are crouched in the front compartment of the TARDIS, the time vortex whirling above their heads in a maelstrom of impossible colours. “Ready!” he yells back over its roar. 

“Bert, swerve left on my mark!” shouts Miss Fisher. “Three, two, one - _now!”_

And suddenly they’re barrelling down a dusty road under the blazing hot sun straight towards the cab. Jack glimpses Bert and Cec’s grim faces before Bert swerves hard to the left to reveal their pursuer.

It’s a monstrosity of a vehicle, bristling with iron spikes like a spiny anteater. Close enough and it could puncture the cab’s tyres. Men in masks and goggles are hanging out of its sides, firing with abandon.

Jack has just about enough time to take this all in before Miss Fisher hangs a hair’s breadth left so that instead of crashing headlong into the spiked jalopy, they whiz along its side. “ _Fire_ _!”_ yells Jack, and Collins rakes the jalopy’s flank with the flamethrower.

Miss Fisher flings the TARDIS into a spin and throws it after the vehicle, which is smoking furiously from their onslaught. Some of the spikes have loosened and fallen off; the TARDIS skates deftly around the debris. Someone pops out of the top of the jalopy, coughing violently, and aims at them; Jack grabs Collins by the collar and drags him down as bullets bounce off the windscreen. 

The road ahead is pitted with potholes. Jack watches for the first wheel of the jalopy to dip into a hole and the shooter in the roof to stumble. “Again,” he tells Collins, who gives the tail of the jalopy another lash of flame.

The jalopy’s engine has begun to shudder. Abruptly it peels off the road and stutters some way into the sand. A few figures fall out of it and begin to run, before it explodes in an orange ball of flame.

The TARDIS slows to meet the cab, which is idling by the road. “Thanks, miss,” says Cec from the machine gun turret. “That was a pretty piece of driving back there.”

“You’re welcome!” says Miss Fisher. “The cab’s looking well.”

“Handles like a dream,” says Bert. “We’d be raking in fares, if only Cec here weren’t such a bleeding heart.”

It’s said without heat, and Cec only rolls his eyes in response - clearly an old argument. Miss Fisher nods. “Let’s see your passenger.”

The woman in the back seat is unconscious, her clothes rags and her feet bloody. Cec and Bert get her out of the cab and into the TARDIS. It is clear they are familiar with it; they know the way to Mac’s lab and Dot greets them with a happy cry.

“We shouldn’t hang about,” says Bert. “If it was people-traders she was running from, they’ll send more after her.”

“She’s severely dehydrated,” says Miss Fisher. “She was running through the waste?”

Cec nods. “Ran into the road - almost hit her. Couldn’t get much out of her - only that her name’s Alice and she’s from Green Mill. That’s where we were headed, when the buzzard showed up.”

“Well, lead on,” says Miss Fisher. “We’ll follow the cab. At the very least we can get her home.”

*

“People-traders, you say?” 

The mayor of Green Mill is a woman of middle years called Miss Charlesworth. She frowns as Bert and Cec relay the story of how they found Alice. “Did they follow you here?”

“No, ma’am. We shook them off with the help of Miss Fisher here.”

“Doesn’t matter,” says Madam Lyon, the angular woman who owns the saloon they are seated in. “They’ll track her here in the end. You’d have done better to leave her by the side of the road.”

“We’ll have none of that,” says Miss Charlesworth sharply to her. To them she says: “We’re glad you brought Alice back to us. She should not have gone out on her own; the delivery girls usually make their runs in pairs, but her partner Leila is down with influenza.”

“Alice is the fastest rider,” pipes up a girl in overalls, perched on the bar, who can’t be more than sixteen. “If she can get taken, what chance do the rest of us have?”

“Millie, go help your mother see to these gentlemen’s cab,” says Miss Charlesworth sternly. Millie pouts, but leaves the saloon.

“If I may ask,” says Jack, “why are there no men in Green Mill?”

Madam Lyon gives a short bark of laughter. “Not from around here, are you?”

Miss Charlesworth sighs and nods at the young woman who seems to be serving as her secretary. “Clara, you want to take this one?”

“Green Mill is a water town,” says Clara pleasantly, as if opening a guided tour. “It was also, formerly, a mining town. Three hundred and eighty-five days ago, the mine collapsed due to irregularities in the shaft. Most of the men of the town were down in the mine that day, and none of them returned.”

“Oldest male in town’s probably Ma Derrimut’s eldest,” says Madam Lyon, “and he’s barely seventeen.”

“We’ve made do since,” says Miss Charlesworth. “It’s plenty hard, but we still have the aquifer, and water counts for a lot in this land. Of course, we haven’t reckoned on the people-traders coming for us.”

“What if there was a way for everyone in town to leave?” says Miss Fisher.

“How?” demands Madam Lyon. “Have you got the cars to carry us all?”

“My car can carry quite a few people,” says Miss Fisher with modesty.

“Thank you, but no,” says Miss Charlesworth heavily. “Whoever wants to go can leave with you, but some of us have put too much into this land to let it go without a fight.”

“Why, then I’ll stay with you,” says Miss Fisher.

The women stare at her. “You don’t know us,” says Madam Lyon, narrowing her eyes. “What do you want for it? There’s nothing done for free in the waste.”

Miss Fisher shrugs. “Like you said, we’re not from around here. Now, should the town come under siege, what would be the best building to hunker down in?”

“The water plant.” Clara steps out of the saloon and points down the main street at a grey building backed by a cliff face. “It’s made of concrete, and we would need to safeguard the water supply anyway.”

“Arms,” says Jack. “Have you any?”

“I will request an inventory,” says Clara. “Not all of us can shoot - I myself am not capable - but our best shots would be Madam Lyon here, Miss Lee, who runs the bookshop, and Mrs Tizzard.”

“A cold fish and a drunk,” says Madam Lyon darkly. “We’ll be lucky if the Lizard gets her head out of a bottle long enough to find the trigger.”

Miss Fisher turns to the rest of them - Bert and Cec, Collins and Dot holding hands white-knuckled, Jack. “This is going to be dangerous. More so than usual. It’s not your fight; if anyone wants to leave now, I can drop them off first.”

Nobody moves except Bert, who draws angrily on his cigarette and stubs it out in a saloon ashtray. 

Miss Fisher nods. “Let’s lock and load.”

*

“I suppose I know my way around a rifle,” says Sylvia Lee, “though I wouldn’t stake the town’s safety on it.”

Miss Lee does not look like the kind of person you would ask to defend a town. When Jack walked in, she was shelving battered paperbacks from some series called Harry Potter, and absorbed the news of their impending invasion with little expression. But the shotgun she pulls out from under the counter is serviceable, and she loads and racks it with deft expertise.

“I learnt on the job,” she says.

“Do a lot of people try to rob bookshops?”

“No,” says Miss Lee prosaically, “before this; I was a travelling librarian. It can be somewhat perilous on the roads.”

“What led you to settle in Green Mill?”

“A man.” Miss Lee turns back to shelving her books. After a while, she adds: “If you must know, he died.”

“I’m sorry. You’re a mine widow?”

“Not even that.” Miss Lee’s tone of voice has not changed; she might as well be discussing the weather. “His widow is somewhere in the core citadels; I daresay she will have heard by now. Anyway, I didn’t leave after he died, and I don’t plan to now. I’ll be over at the plant once I’m done safeguarding the books.” She nods towards a trapdoor in the floor. “Cellar, in case they set fire to the shops.”

“Clara said you’d know where to find Mrs Tizzard.”

“Elsie?” Miss Lee nods towards what Jack took to be a pile of rags in the window seat. It emits a wheezing noise. “She’s sleeping off whatever she took last night. I let her kip in here in the afternoons, so she can stay out of the sun.” She gives him a wry look. “It’s not like we get a lot of people coming into bookshops these days.”

The reek of rotgut is strong on Elsie Tizzard’s breath as Jack crouches down next to her. She cracks open one eye. “Whosit?”

“This is Jack Robinson, Else,” says Miss Lee, stacking hardback volumes into boxes. “He says Green Mill is to be invaded by people-traders; we’re being called to arms.”

“They can go hang,” mutters Elsie Tizzard. “Have you seen m’boy?”

_Mine_? mouths Jack at Miss Lee, who shakes her head. “Her son ran off a while back. He’s probably in a war party, if he hasn’t died somewhere out in the waste by now.”

“‘S not true. He’s a good boy.”

“I hear you are the best shot in town, Mrs Tizzard,” says Jack.

“Huh. Georgina tell you that? Could shoot the wings off a fly on a good day. ‘Course, I haven’t had a good day in an age.” She squints up at him. “You’ve got kind eyes. Like my son’s.”

“I’ll try to get her to the plant sober, once I’ve packed up the shop,” says Miss Lee.

Elsie Tizzard snorts and turns over, moving fitfully back into sleep.

*

“I reckon it’s defensible,” says Miss Fisher, pacing the upper gangway of the water plant. “Board up these windows and you have yourself a decent shooting gallery. What’s the safest room in here?”

“Pump room,” says the plant manager, a tall brunette in overalls who introduced herself as Daisy. “It’s in the heart of the building, you’ve got to get through three doors to reach it.”

Miss Fisher nods. “The TARDIS will go in there during the siege, as will everyone who can’t handle a weapon.”

“Who’s in charge here?” It’s Mac, hollering from the ground floor. “I need a room to set up as a medbay, if Phryne’s going to be taking the TARDIS out for recon.”

“That would be me.” Daisy leans over the railing. Mac takes her in: the short hair tied back with a kerchief, the smudge of dirt on her right cheekbone, the wrench she is swinging casually between her fingers, as if exercising her wrist. 

“I’m Dr Elizabeth MacMillan.”

“Never met a proper doctor,” says Daisy. “Don’t get a lot of those out here in these parts.”

“What d’you do if you get sick?”

Daisy shrugs. “It’s an hour’s drive to the nearest town with a clinic, if the road gangs don’t get you first. Mostly we try not to get sick. I’ll find you that room, Dr MacMillan.” 

“Mac. Mac will do.”

Daisy throws her a lazy two-fingered salute and clatters off down the stairs. Mac watches her go with an expression Jack has not seen her wear before, a kind of sharpening in it. She catches him looking and raises an eyebrow. Jack raises an eyebrow back at her. Mac rolls her eyes and stalks off to supervise Bert and Cec moving Alice out of the TARDIS on a stretcher. 

“Jack!” shouts Miss Fisher from downstairs. “Recon. Coming?”

*

“When I was a boy,” says Jack, “I used to want to be in a Western.”

“This is a little like that, isn’t it?” Miss Fisher is peering through the binoculars at the dust clouds on the horizon. “How does that feel?”

“Frankly?” says Jack. “Terrible.”

They are on a cliff overlooking the wreckage from that morning, which has burnt itself into embers. Clara has come along at Miss Charlesworth’s request, to “take stock”. The TARDIS, while still vaguely echoing a Hispano-Suiza, has put up a grim and battered exterior of sheet metal plating. There are gun ports under the headlights where there had been none before.

“Here they come,” says Miss Fisher, as the dust clouds draw nearer. “Bloody hell, that’s a war rig.”

The rig is massive, a cannibalised truck hitched to a fuel tank. A couple of smaller cars and a passel of bikes circle it. Miss Fisher hands Clara the binoculars.

“They’re going into the wreck,” Clara narrates. “They’ll want the footage of the crash, I expect, if the recorder’s survived.”

A man in black steps out of the rig. He wears a wide-brimmed hat, and from the swagger in his step and the way the other men cleave to him, Jack surmises he is the one calling the shots. Some of the men have retrieved the recorder from the wreck, and now they bring it to him.

Miss Fisher has the binoculars again, and Jack hears her sharp intake of breath, feels her go still next to him.

“Miss Fisher?”

There is a tremor in her hand as she grips the binoculars. She knows this man, Jack realises. “Who is that?”

“They call him the Frenchman,” says Clara. Her voice is low and worried. “All the people-traders are known for their cruelty, but him especially so.”

“His name is René Dubois,” says Miss Fisher. Her tone is so flat light would bounce off it. “He should not be here. How could he be here?”

“Who is he?” demands Jack again.

“My first companion,” says Miss Fisher in that distant voice. “I can’t - no.”

Jack reaches out instinctively to steady her. She flinches from his grasp.

Down on the waste, Dubois is studying the footage. Then he looks up. He looks in their direction, even though he cannot possibly see them at this distance. He touches his fingers to his lips and blows a kiss into the sky.

*

“This just came in over the array,” says Miss Charlesworth, grimly. “Have a listen.”

They are gathered in the control room of the plant, in front of a wall flickering with weathered, dusty screens. At Miss Charlesworth’s nod, Daisy pulls up a message on the main screen and plays it.

“This is René Dubois.”

Jack chances a glance at Miss Fisher. Her expression is so brittle the slightest blow might crack it side to side.

“To the good women of Green Mill - I know you have Phryne Fisher in your midst. Give her up to me, and I will let the rest of it slide. You can keep the town. You can even keep Alice. My boys and I will move on. I give my word.”

Dubois pauses to suck air through his teeth. “But if I don’t get Phryne Fisher, we will burn your town to the ground. We’ll take the women we can sell, and we’ll kill the ones we can’t. One woman for a whole town - think about it. You have till noon.”

“I won’t lie,” says Madam Lyon into the silence that follows, “we did think about it.”

Bert has his gun cocked and in her face before anyone else can move. “Don’t you bloody dare give Miss Fisher up to that bastard.”

Madam Lyon stares down the barrel coolly. “As if I’m fool enough to take the Frenchman at his word. He’d take her, and then he’d help himself to the rest of us.” There’s the sound of a hammer cocking. Bert glances down at the pistol protruding from Madam Lyon’s coat. “So easy on that trigger, darling.”

“Oh, stop it,” says Miss Fisher wearily. “We’ll give him what he wants.”

“No,” says Jack. He’s echoed by several people in the room.

“Miss, no!”

“Phryne, she just said - ”

“The hell you will, miss.”

She holds up a hand for silence. “He wants Phryne Fisher? He’ll bloody well get Phryne Fisher.”

*

“So you put this in your ear,” says Clara, handing him a device the size of a peanut, “and you’ll be able to hear me, and I’ll be able to hear what’s happening around you.”

“Testing!” says Collins loudly. “Can you hear me?”

“Because you’re standing next to us, Collins.”

“Ah, right.” Collins exits the control room and shuts the door. “Can you hear me now!” they hear him shout faintly.

“Yes, nice and clear.” Clara continues to Jack: “Miss Fisher gave us four of these. You’ll have to set her up with the third, afterwards. The master will be with me and Miss Charlesworth in the control room.”

“With her, really,” says Miss Charlesworth. “Only Clara knows where everything is.”

Clara ducks her head modestly. “I must go check on the stocktaking.”

Jack follows her out into the front hall of the plant, which is being prepped for siege. Daisy is overseeing the hammering of planks over the windows. Bert and Cec are helping the town’s mechanic, a pale-haired woman who introduced herself as Ailsa Wilton, drive various vehicles into position to form a barrier across the hall. Mr Butler has laid out what seems to be the TARDIS armoury on a table and is proffering various weapons to those assembled as if he is a grocer recommending choice vegetables. “For madam,” he is saying to Elsie Tizzard, who has come in on the arm of Sylvia Lee looking considerably more sober than yesterday, though also more disgruntled, “might I suggest our Winchester?”

“Old-school, eh?” Elsie turns the rifle over in her hands. “I guess we’ll make do.”

“Nice to see you walking straight for a change,” Madam Lyon says to her as she slots bullets into a bandolier. 

“I’ve got a headache the size of the Big Nothing,” Elsie shoots back, “this had better be worth it. Well - ” this to Jack “ - what’s it to be, boy?”

“By the upper windows, if you please.”

“A gentleman, this one,” says Elsie, nudging Sylvia with her elbow. “Right, girls. One man, one bullet, eh?”

“I want you in the pump room with the children,” Miss Fisher is saying to Dot as they stride over the floor. “If all else fails, you have to pack everyone else into the TARDIS and fly it out of here.”

“I can’t fly the TARDIS!” cries Dot, horrified.

“I showed you, it’s not hard - Mr Butler will help you, and otherwise you’ve just got to let the old girl have her head.”

“But it won’t come to that,” says Dot anxiously. “Will it? ”

Miss Fisher stops walking and takes her by the shoulders. “Dot, it is absolutely imperative that René does not get his hands on the TARDIS. If I tell you and Hugh to go, you go and you don’t look back.”

“And leave you behind?”

“I don’t run from a fight, Dot.”

“Well,” says Dot, “with all due respect, miss, then it is rather hypocritical of you to tell me to do so,” and then she turns on her heel and marches out of the room, stopping only to snag Collins by the elbow. Miss Fisher gapes after them.

“‘Scuse me, miss?”

It’s that girl, the mechanic’s daughter. She is standing mulishly before them, a thumb hooked into the strap of her overalls, a posse of kids behind her. There’s a tall, bronzed youth and a willowy blonde whose hands are fiddling restlessly with a lighter. 

“Millie, is it?” says Miss Fisher. “Why aren’t you with the other children in the pump room?”

“See, we don’t want to do that,” says Millie. “We’re not useless kids. We want to help.”

“This is dangerous,” says Jack.

“Living in this world’s dangerous!” cries Millie. “It’s been messed up by people who died long before we were even born and we’ll be lucky if we get to be as old as you. Look - ” she pulls the boy next to her forward “ - Tom here’s good with his fists, and he’s quick and quiet, and I know my way around anything on wheels, as much as any revhead in the waste, and Rose can set anything you like on fire.”

Jack opens his mouth to protest, but Miss Fisher says, a note of interest in her voice: “Ever blow anything up?”

The kids exchange looks. “Sure,” says Rose. “What do you need?”

*

After the frenzy of preparations, there is the dead time of waiting. Jack walks the plant, doing a final round of inspections. He passes Bert and Cec sitting on the footboard of their cab, sharing a cigarette. They nod at him as he moves along the barrier, checking each vehicle. 

“Do you think she’ll be all right?” he hears Cec say. “Alice, I mean.”

“She’ll be fine,” says Bert. “She’ll pull through. If she doesn’t, it is how it is. You know that, mate.”

“Yeah. Shouldn’t have to be that way, though.”

“It’s the way of the bloody world.” Bert hands the cigarette over. “Not us, though. We’re not a part of it. We got to choose. That’s why Miss Fisher gave us the cab, so we could help those as haven’t got a choice.”

Cec nods and takes a drag on the cigarette. They sit in silence.

“Anyway,” says Bert after a while, “Alice will be fine.”

In the pump room, Dot is knitting. She does this in moments of stress, Jack has observed, especially when there is nothing else she can do. She and Collins are perched on the hood of the TARDIS, Collins with his revolver in one hand and Dot’s ball of yarn in the other. They flash him quick smiles as he passes.

In the corridor outside, a woman carrying a basket of rations gives him a hard look. He recognises her as Tom Derrimut’s mother, Cora. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she says balefully.

The door of the makeshift medbay is open. At first Jack thinks it is empty - its patient and most of its contents have been moved back on board the TARDIS for a quick evacuation - but as he passes, he glimpses two figures standing close together in the shadows. He recognises Daisy first, in profile, and then as the other looks up, he sees it is Mac. She locks eyes with him briefly, and then she moves her hand from Daisy’s cheek to push the door shut.

He finds Miss Fisher on one of the back gangways overlooking the plant floor, spinning the chamber of her pistol restlessly. “You still think it’s a bad plan,” she says as he approaches.

“It’s an unnecessary risk you’re taking.”

“I’ve run from René Dubois long enough.” She slots the chamber back in, then hands him the weapon. “I suppose you must think me a fool.”

Jack pockets the pistol. “Why would I think that?”

“That someone like me could ever have been under the thumb of someone like him.” Her mouth twists bitterly. “I was young then - well, younger. It was right after the war, and I thought - I thought I loved him. I did love him. I haven’t made that mistake again since.”

“Not once?” 

“No,” she says quietly. “ _That_ is an unnecessary risk.”

Jack could be dead in a few hours. In the interest of tying up loose ends, this is good to know. For some reason - perhaps all the dust in the air - his throat isn’t producing any words, so he simply nods.

Miss Fisher is watching him carefully. “Jack,” she says, “I - ”

Clara’s voice crackles in his ear. “Dust clouds on the horizon. They’re here.”

*

“Are you sure you want to do this?” says Bert from the front of the cab.

“Stick to the plan.” Miss Fisher’s lips are in a thin line.

“Sorry we brought you into this, miss,” says Cec.

“You don’t ever have to apologise for calling on me.”

“Righto,” says Bert grimly. The doors of the water plant door open, and the cab passes through them into high noon.

Green Mill is a long town. Dubois and his gang are arrayed at the other end of the main street, guns drawn, their rig looming behind them, parked in the gap between two slopes of boulders. The cab rolls to a stop in the centre of the street, the shopfronts and houses on either side gaping and empty.

“How are we looking, Clara?” says Jack.

“Clear on our end,” says Clara in his ear. “Standing by.”

Jack reaches out and squeezes Miss Fisher’s hand. “You ready?”

Miss Fisher nods tightly. Then they get out of the cab.

Dubois flicks his cigarette into the dirt and saunters forward too.

Jack stops in front of the cab. Miss Fisher continues on alone, until she and Dubois are facing one another.

“My Phryne,” says Dubois. “You look well.”

Miss Fisher says nothing. She could be carved out of marble, so still she is.

“Hands where I can see them,” says Dubois. “Your men as well.” He gestures with his own pistol.

“You let them go,” says Miss Fisher. “The town too. That is the deal, René.”

“Yes, yes,” says Dubois, bored. “Now, come here.”

She goes to him, every step as if she expects a landmine. Jack keeps his eyes trained on the two of them. He ignores the shadows moving silently among the rocks, behind the line of Dubois’ men.

Dubois makes a show of patting her down. “I came unarmed,” says Miss Fisher with a grimace, “like you said.”

“It’s hard to trust a woman like you, who goes behind a man’s back.” Dubois grabs her and spins her around, gun jammed under her chin. She locks eyes with Jack, her expression frighteningly blank. 

Out of the corner of his eye, Jack sees a figure dart out from behind the rig, running for the rocks. “Tom is clear,” says Clara in his ear. “Waiting on Millie.”

“Which one is your lover?” says Dubois suddenly.

Miss Fisher blinks. “There’s no one, René.”

“Lies!” The barrel of the gun digs into her jaw. “You forget, Phryne. You forget I know you.”

“You know nothing of me,” she snaps. _Please don’t goad him_ , thinks Jack desperately.

“I know you’ll run into another man’s arms the moment I take my eyes off you. Is that not why you abandoned me?”

“I didn’t abandon you,” says Miss Fisher through gritted teeth. “I fled from you.”

“You shot me with a temporal displacer,” says Dubois in her ear. “Years I spent on your trail, hitchhiking my way through the ages. Did you think I liked being stranded in this godforsaken waste?” Dubois points his gun suddenly at Bert, who swallows but otherwise does not move a muscle. “Is it him?” The gun drifts to Cec behind the wheel. Jack tracks the black barrel of it until it is pointing at him. “Yes,” says Dubois with a sneer. “This one.”

“No,” says Miss Fisher, panic rising in her voice, and Jack knows it to be a mistake from the sneer that breaks over Dubois’ face, “he’s not - René, you promised - ”

Jack sees Millie scoot out from under the rig and race flat out for the cover of the boulders. 

“He dies first.” Dubois cocks the pistol. 

Millie is seconds away from cover. Jack closes his eyes.

He hears the gun go off. Miss Fisher screams. Clara says crisply: “Clear.”

“Now,” says Jack.

The rig blows. They are standing outside the blast radius, but he still staggers from the force of it, sees fire bloom behind his tightly shut lids. When he opens his eyes, Miss Fisher is grappling with Dubois for the gun. Dubois fires again; the shot goes wide and then Miss Fisher knocks the gun from his hand. Jack draws his own weapon and shoots the two men closest to Dubois as they struggle to get up. Behind him he hears the rat-tat-tat of Bert’s rifle. Miss Fisher has Dubois on the ground now; she punches him once, twice in the face. 

A dirt bike roars past them, Tom in the seat, Millie riding pillion. The klaxons sound; the plant’s doors are closing behind them. “Phryne!” yells Jack. 

Miss Fisher punches Dubois one last time and turns to run. Jack tosses her pistol; she snatches it out of the air, leaps onto the cab’s footboard and spins in one fluid motion, firing a volley as Cec flings the cab into reverse and floors it, peeling hell-for-leather back down the street towards the plant. Jack flattens himself against the cab as the edge of the plant’s door just grazes him, before the steel clangs shut between them and Dubois’ men.

“Mac!” Miss Fisher is screaming. “Mac!” And then she is by his side, her hands frantically roving over him. “Where is it, where is it - ”

“Where’s what?”

“He _shot_ you, Jack!” Her voice is blurry with tears. 

“Oh,” says Jack. And with that the pain comes flooding back, cutting through the adrenaline. He lifts his hand from his side; it comes away wet with blood. “At least it’s not my good arm.”

“He was going to shoot you in the face! Why didn’t you give the order?”

“Millie wasn’t clear,” says Jack absently. He can see Millie, white-faced, hovering in the periphery of his vision. “Good job,” he says in her and Tom’s direction. “Now get to the pump room.”

Mac has appeared. “Bullet went clean through, that’s a mercy. Sit down and I’ll stitch this up for you.”

“No,” says Jack, “no time.” He can hear gunfire upstairs - Bert and Cec are already racing towards the boarded windows. Jack tosses Miss Fisher the last listening device; she aims the sonic at it and fits it into her ear while he heads for the stairs, ignoring the pain in his side. “Clara, what’s going on out there?”

“We have eleven men converging on the plant,” Clara says in his ear. “Seven down in the blast. Two unaccounted for.”

“Do we have eyes on Dubois?”

“Afraid not,” says Clara. “I’ll review my memory - give me a second.”

Jack reaches the window through which Elsie is firing and risks peering out. The men are using the town’s buildings for cover, though the women are holding them off well enough. Some of the men are trying to climb to upper balconies to get a better vantage point; Elsie picks off one scaling the pillar of the nearest house. She cackles. “How’re you doing, girls?”

“It’s not a competition, Else,” says Miss Lee calmly. She fires; someone hiding by a verandah howls.

“It is a bit,” Elsie calls back, and then Jack has to drag her down as someone unleashes a salvo at their window, which is only ended when Madam Lyon manages to kneecap the shooter.

“Still no eyes on Dubois,” says Clara, “but there is something you should know. During my review, I recognised Matthew Tizzard among the men.”

“Matthew - ” begins Jack, and Elsie’s head snaps towards him. “Matty?” she says tremulously. “Is that my boy?”

“Where is he now, Clara?” asks Miss Fisher.

“I don’t have sight of him either. But there’s an old underground entrance to the water plant through the mines - it’s partly collapsed, but if one had enough dynamite one could blow a way through. Matthew Tizzard grew up in Green Mill; he would know about this.”

“Don’t hurt him,” Elsie pleads, pulling at Jack’s sleeve. “He’s a good boy.” 

Jack puts his hand out to quell her. “Where does the entrance open up?” 

“Near the pump room.”

“Collins,” says Jack urgently, “Collins, there may be a - ”

An explosion rocks the plant. Not enough to unsettle the foundations, but enough to blast through some rubble. Jack takes off running. Miss Fisher meets him on the ground floor, and they have made it to the quadrant that the pump room is in when they hear Dot scream.

In the pump room, Dubois has his gun to Dot’s temple. Collins is lying on the ground, bleeding from the leg; Mac is huddled over it, pressing down on the wound. 

“René,” says Miss Fisher, hands out, pleading, “it’s not her you want, it’s me. Let her go.”

“Maybe it’s time I traded you in for a new model,” Dubois snarls back. “Give me the TARDIS key.”

“Let her go first.”

“No!” Dubois jams the gun harder into Dot’s temple; a wordless cry of rage comes from Collins on the floor.

“I have it!” screams Dot. “I have the key!” 

“No, Dot,” whispers Miss Fisher. 

“I have it,” repeats Dot, her eyes screwed shut in terror, “just, please, I’m just going to reach for it now - ”

“Matthew Tizzard, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Elsie pushes past Jack, headed towards Dubois and the man standing behind him with a gun trained on the other occupants of the room - this must be her son. “Ma,” he says uncertainly, “stay out of this.”

“ _You_ stay out of it,” Elsie retorts. “Put that down, there’s a good lad.”

“Get her out of the way, Tizzard,” warns Dubois. Elsie ignores him completely and continues advancing on her son. 

Matthew Tizzard swings his gun towards his mother, though his hand is trembling. “For the love of God, Ma, get out of here.”

“Put that down,” repeats Elsie, “and come home.”

“Tizzard,” growls Dubois, and that is when Dot pulls the knitting needle out of her sleeve and stabs him in the hand.

A gun goes off; it’s not immediately clear which one. Jack throws himself on the ground. He sees Dot scramble towards Collins and Elsie hurl herself at her son, whose gun is knocked from his hand by Tom Derrimut. Dubois, hand bleeding, turns towards the TARDIS as Miss Fisher yells: “ _Drop it, René!”_ He grabs for the door - which opens of its own accord to reveal Alice, clinging to a headrest for balance with one hand and holding up a pistol with the other.

She fires three shots point-blank into Dubois’s chest. 

Dubois sinks to the ground, clutching in surprise at the blood spreading across his shirt. He turns away from Alice, who has sagged back into the passenger seat of the TARDIS, and towards Miss Fisher. “Phryne,” he says in a haggard whisper.

Miss Fisher says nothing. Wordlessly she steps over his body to take the gun from Alice’s shaking hands, and then she folds her into her arms as Alice begins to sob, and the light slowly leaves Dubois’s eyes.

*

“There we go,” says Mac, tying off the last stitch in Jack’s side. “Another scar to add to your very fine collection.”

“Which I could certainly do without.” Jack winces as she slaps some kind of medical patch onto it. 

“Haven’t you heard? Women go wild for scars. Or at least that’s what you’d think, the way Collins is carrying on. Bullet grazed his leg and he won’t stop going on about it.”

“It’s his first time. Let him have his excitement, getting shot grows dull very quickly.”

“The stitches should dissolve on their own. Keep it dry for a day, don’t scratch it, you know the drill.” As he rolls his shirt back down, she adds: “There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about, Jack.”

“Go on.”

Mac pulls out a chair and straddles it across from him. “I’m thinking of staying here for a while longer.”

“What, in the waste?” Jack studies her sombre expression. “Because of Daisy?”

“Partly that,” says Mac. “Partly because I’ve spent so long gadding about with Phryne that I’ve forgotten why it is I do what I do - what it is like to be useful.”

“You are useful with us.”

Mac shakes her head. “Not in the way she is, or the Doctor is, any of their ilk. She’ll swoop in and fix the problem, then she’ll be off for the next adventure. I’m a healer. Healing takes time. And this is a place that needs healing.” 

“She’ll be cut up about it.”

“She’ll live,” says Mac. “She’s done without me before. She has the TARDIS and Mr Butler, she has Dot, and now she has you.” She fixes Jack with her steely gaze. “Promise me you’ll look after her.”

“I promise,” says Jack.

Mac claps him on his good shoulder. “I might actually miss you, Jack Robinson.”

“And I you, Doctor.” 

“Good man.” They rise, and she nods at the door. “Send the next one in.”

*

“If there is even the slightest sign of trouble,” says Miss Fisher, pressing the beacon into Mac’s hand, “or you just want off this rock, you call me at once, do you hear?”

Mac laughs. “I’ll call you, Phryne. I’ll call you anyway.”

“Bert, Cec, you’re to keep an eye on her.”

“Not a problem,” says Bert. “Reckon we’ll be passing this way more often, now that Cec is sweet on Miss Alice Hartley.”

“Oi, shut it,” says Cec, swatting him half-heartedly with his cap.

Miss Fisher pulls Mac into a tight hug, and they stay that way for some time, two women holding each other in a dusty street as a town slowly picks itself up around them, dismantling a war rig and digging graves.

Eventually Miss Fisher releases Mac and gets into the TARDIS. She adjusts the rear-view mirror and watches Mac walk away to where Daisy is sitting on the porch of the general store, waiting for her.

“Are you all right?” asks Jack.

“Yes,” says Miss Fisher. She releases the clutch and the TARDIS begins rolling down the street, picking up speed as it goes. “I believe I am.”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As one may gather from this, my favourite minor MFMM character is Clara Whiting - what an MVP! - followed closely by Sylvia Lee and Camellia Lu (more on this later). Also I found creating OCs for the last chapter so exhausting that I simply decided instead to populate this episode with a whole bunch of minor characters, of which MFMM is a veritable treasure trove. 
> 
> As I was writing Elsie Tizzard, I was getting these Vuvalini vibes. And then I did a bit of a search and discovered Gillian Jones actually did play one of the Vuvalini in Mad Max: Fury Road. What do you know! She isn’t the one who says “One man, one bullet”, but I had to give that line to Elsie in this episode.


End file.
